Reversing Polarity -- Voodoo or Easy Tweak?

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.

Unlike most audiophile tweeks, the absolute polarity effect, at least superficially, seems to make scientific sense. Also, unlike most tweeks, it is easy and cheap. However, I do suspect that the science might fall apart on closer examination, and the real world usefulness of the tweek is minimal because of what you describe as "recording engineer indifference".

I guess I would say that in the past when I had the capability on digital easily compare that about 1 disk in 10 made a difference. I should say that Clark Johnsen also once visited when I had the capability on vinyl and digital. He heard it on more recordings, and when he pointed out what differences he was hearing, others did indeed also hear them.