High resolution digital is dead. The best DAC's killed it.

I have pro gear that has a phase inversion button. Kind of useful to quickly check things. I am surprised that nobody has this. Amazing that this hobby values fancy cables and the effort that goes into swapping that fancy stuff out but a simple polarity switch seems too complex!

Um, no one has it because almost no one finds any value in it.

But rather than swap cables you can always swap your speaker connections. This is something everyone can do.

For those of a digital mindset, you can use the public utility SOX to invert absolute polarity on most common formats. Makes it easy to experiment at home.



Best,E

@erik_squires

Are you saying nobody knows or cares what polarity is anyway and wouldn’t notice if they got it wrong. So a quick polarity check with a button is superfluous.

Are you saying that you can swap cables quick enough to A and B back and forth for polarity? I find that an amazingly archaic approach that could easily wind up in errors between one speaker and another and one component and another.

I listened to a 50K system recently and wound up informing the owner something was out of phase. He was puzzled initially but thanked me after he fixed it. Not sure how long that situation had gone on - a simple switch makes it much easier to check.

Switches are nice.

Having a L to R phase mismatch is not what we are talking about. 
I'm just saying that if the perceived quality of audio reproduction could be improved so dramatically by inverting the polarity of playback it would be a common feature.

I have to believe that the lack of sensitivity to this means most of us don't have a lot of value for it.

“I'm just saying that if the perceived quality of audio reproduction could be improved so dramatically by inverting the polarity of playback it would be a common feature.”

Nobody said the sound is improved dramatically. Give me a break. It’s more like a subtle but powerful difference at best. It depends on the recording and the system and the listeners skill at hearing. Why would it be a common feature? The industry doesn’t believe in Polarity, power cords, fuses or wire directionality. So what else is new?

erik_squires

... no one has it because almost no one finds any value in it.

Every Audio Research preamp I've ever seen has a phase inversion function. It can be very useful!

The old McIntosh MX-100 tuner-preamp also had this function, although I don't know if it's included on more recent Mac products.