Reversing Polarity -- Voodoo or Easy Tweak?

Trust your ears, Jea48.

I listened to the entire Jennifer Warnes Cd, I spoke of in my earlier post, with the speaker cables reversed on my speakers. After a few tracks the sound just didn't seem involving, became kind of boring if you know what I mean. After the last track played, I reversed the speaker cables back the way the were originally, Amp+ speaker+, Amp- speaker-. Pushed play on the CDp, to cut to the chase, I prefer the sound better this way...Biggest thing I noticed Jennifer's voice was fuller, more involving.

Jim

Herman notes:

I haven't conducted any experiments to confirm this hypothesis

Someone else has -- and I tried desperately & unsuccessfully to find the ref. Apparently you WILL notice a discrepancy. This, (afa I remember) is variably termed as "slight loss of detail" or "microdynamics", etc. This "discrepancy" was particularly obvious when the same musical passage was played with fundamental & 2nd & 4th harmonic shifted into the pass band. ANyway, if I find the ref, I post it.

I wish I had access to a storage scope and a mic. It would be very interesting to examine the shape of transient waveforms (like the drum) both close mic'd and distant. Of course, once the signal is played back through a loudspeaker and rerecorded I suspect that any slight difference due to polarity/phase will be unimportant. Very few speakers can reproduce a square wave (original Ohms were one), and those only at relatively low frequency like 1000m Hz.

Eldartford, I suspect that you are right that would see little difference on a scope. This is always my concern as in some cases I heard a decidedly different sound with a reverse in polarity. I suspect that recording engineers indifference to polarity or multi-miking may contribute to why some records and disks seem unresponsive to such changes. But if recordings in which I hear differences fail to show a difference on a scope, I suspect that you and I would come to different conclusions.

At any rate since I now have no easy way to reverse polarity and some recordings sound much better than others, I can only suffer along. I did have a parafeed output line stage from Exemplar which could easily have had a polarity inverter as it was transformer coupled, but it is not available in the H-Cat. Other tube units that I have had, notably the Siltech Millennium did provide a useless inverter which introduced another tube stage to get the inversion.