The video is cute - but, to a degree, the second fellow is essentially "responding to a trick question with a trick answer".
Forgetting his argument about electric fields I could just as easily have said...
"Even if the switch is surrounded by a vacuum, and the contacts are a thousand miles apart, some tiny amount of current will always flow across the gap."
"And, therefore, the bulb will be lit."
In a vacuum tube we heat the cathode because it is easier for electrons to escape the surface of the cathode.
However, at any temperature above absolute zero, at least a few electrons will manage to escape any surface once in a while.
And, as long as a few of them manage to make it to the other contact, then "there has been a current flow".
And, yes, the electric field between the two contacts will cause electrons to be slightly attracted to the opposite contact, causing a net drift in that direction.
(And, according to the original claims, the bulb will light instantly if there is ANY current flow.)
However, to be fair, the original video was expecting us to ignore that detail... as a way to simply the explanation of the "bigger issue".
(The point is that, in an electron tube, we artificially adjust the parameters to make this effect significant enough to be useful to our purpose.)
(We choose specific cathode materials, heat the cathode, place the cathode in close proximity to the plate, and put a significantly powerful electric field between them...)
If you sit a battery in a drawer that battery is slowly draining itself by the current that flows through the air from one terminal to the other.
However, considering the resistance of air, that drainage is negligible compared to the losses inside the battery, so we ignore it.
(Technically that battery would last a tiny bit longer if stored in a vacuum... or if the terminals were insulated by something that is a better insulator than air.)
(In reality there is no such thing as "a perfect conductor" or "a perfect insulator".)
HOWEVER, when you attempt to drag technical minutiae like this into discussions of audio signals, and even worse power cables, the upshot gets absurd rather quickly.
Under proper conditions you can in fact "hear the sound of individual electrons hitting something"...
And that fact contributes to the background noise you hear with many electronic devices - especially tubes.
And, yes, you actually can cause that background noise to sound slightly different by adjusting the patterns in which electrons are emitted in a tube.
If you look you can find some interesting papers about how the shape of the granules with which a tube cathode is coated will affect the character of the background noise it produces.
(At some microscopic level pointy little grains will spray electrons from their pointy ends while it may require a tiny bit higher voltage for electrons on rounded particles to escape the surface.)
However, the effect that various sorts of crystals in a wire alloy have, at the levels of voltage and current used in typical audio circuits, really is negligible.
It might be possible to prove that a certain long wire, composed of a single crystal conductor, has "a better S/N than a similar wire composed of normal alloy".
However, even if that can be shown to be true in a given case, we're talking about the difference between a S/N of 249 dB and a S/N of 249.001 dB...
And, since the limit of human hearing is somewhere between about 95 dB and 120 dB - it really is negligible.
You're literally arguing whether a head-on collision with a mayfly really will slow down a speeding locomotive... and whether the passengers on the train will notice the collision...
(The answer is "yes it will, and you can even calculate the exact amount of effect that collision will have, but nobody will notice it".)
The situation is made more absurd when talking about POWER CABLES.
What you need to understand is that the purpose of the "power supply" in electronic gear is to change the CA power that's coming in into whatever power the device needs to operate.
As a result of this, assuming that the power supply is doing its job perfectly, and the incoming power is within its specified limits...
Even if there were differences in that power, and those differences could potentially be audible, the purpose of the power supply is to ELIMINATE THEM.
And, yes, since nothing is perfect, this process is not perfect either...
That's why we sometimes do hear "interference" when unwanted noise on a power line manages to escape being removed by a less than perfect power supply.
HOWEVER, while this can happen under certain specific circumstance,it is simple paranoia to imagine that it is always happening....
Let's try an example....
In a typical amplifier the actual audio circuitry is designed to tolerate or "reject" a certain amount of noise on the power supply that powers it.
And, assuming that it is well designed, the power supply in that amplifier is designed to "accept the local grid power and convert it into power that is good enough to run that amplifier properly".
So, assuming that amplifier was designed to run in your neighborhood, from the power you get from the wall, then it should work just fine with it.
But let's suppose that, due to some unfortunate circumstance, the power in your area is worse than the designer anticipated, and the power supply is unable to do a thorough job of this.
Or perhaps some device in your home is "contaminating" the power beyond what the amplifier's designer expected.
At that point you might hear some "line noise leaking through into the output".
And, in this case, adding an additional line noise filter, to help the power supply do its job, might be a useful improvement.
And, assuming this were true, and assuming that you lived in an area prone to radio interference, using a shielded power cable between the power filter and that amplifier might help.
Your shielded cable would be preventing noise from getting in and "contaminating" that power between the line filter and the amplifier.
(That six foot power cable between the power filter and your amplifier could pick up radio interference and introduce it into the audio system as noise.)
NOTE that the shielded cable is NOT removing noise... but merely keeping noise from re-entering after the power filter has removed it.
(So adding six feet of shielded cable to the end of miles of unshielded cable will do nothing by itself. It only helps BECAUSE the power filter is also there.)
Many purveyors of things like shielded power cables try to convince you that their shielded cable IS a power filter...
This is simply untrue (and deliberately misleading.)
A similar situation exists with "special crystal wire alloys" and all that silliness...
Yes, at some level, they MAY make a TINY difference, which might somehow be measurable, under some circumstances.
But the difference six feet of "monocrystal super surface copper" will make in a power cable is significantly less than...
The difference caused by two or three pigeons, sitting on the wire, in front of your house...
Or the condition of the mains transformer that powers your neighborhood...
And probably far less than the audible difference caused by traffic three miles away on your local interstate highway...
We all know that potassium cyanide is a deadly poison...
Yet... if I were to toss a shovelful of it into your local reservoir...
There is zero chance that anybody would notice it...
It wouldn't make anyone sick...
And in fact it is unlikely that it would even show up in the most sensitive tests we routinely perform on water...
(And you would be wasting your money to purchase a water filter specifically in the hopes of removing it.)
And that's about as much difference as a few feet of fancy power cord is going to make.
(Also, to be blunt, you can bet that the music you're listening to was recorded, edited, and mastered, all on equipment WITHOUT those fancy power cords.)
The point that I think that both videos reinforce is the point I am trying to make.
I keep hearing that after traveling miles from the power plant and then yards through the house, that the last few feet of "fancy" wire would make no difference to the power. This argument is revealed as naive by these videos.
The real discussion is do the molecules of a conductor, varying purity and organization, affect the behavior, organization, and quality of the power that it is delivering? Since each sections doesn't pass any plasma from one section to the other, but instead hands off "fields".
There should be no difference if the power cable is same as the wire in the wall.
Put another way, instead of a power outlet, just extend the wire in the wall all the way to the device. No fancy cable needed. (Just making a point here. Not advocating anyone do this which is highly dangerous.)
