I made a comment earlier in this thread about directionality in cables. Those little signal flow arrows that are on monster and others. I took apart a pair of Interlink 300 II cables and it looks like they use the red wire as the hot lead running between the center conductor of the two phono plugs on the ends of the cable. They use the black wire as the return connecting it to the phono plug shield at both ends. They only connect the shield of the twisted pair cable at the "source" end that is the end oposite the arrow heads.

This actually makes sense from an electrical standpoint. Breaking the shield at one end and grounding at the other allows it to still act as a shield but does not allow any ground loop to be set up.

This is real good for subwoofer cables where there is usually 30 feet of cable between the receiver and the active speaker amp input and they plug into seperate power outlets.

Note that this only makes sense for audio cables (not digital cables) that are shielded, twisted-pairs where the shield is only that a shield. The shield on a coaxial cable sould never be cut since it is a conductor and part of the signal path.