Neutral electronics are a farce...

Atmasphere do you know if the MLP label recordings were "inverted"?

I've never heard anything about that.   My understanding is they have the "holographic imaging"  the best ones  do because they were miked very simply for that (2 or 3 mikes for natural stereo live recordings).

Did they know of and play phasing tricks in the production?

How about more modern champs like Mapleshade or Dorian?

Not being one to beat a dead horse, of course, but according to the database of recordings vs polarity which one assumes is not obviously the complete listing of everything ever recorded, let’s not be ridiculous, but what is interesting is that actually just scanning the list of recordings, marked N for normal (correct polarity) and R for REVERSED/INVERTED polarity, the number of recordings that INVERT polarity far outnumber the ones that don’t. By the way, the entire label Deutsches Gramophon are apparently R not just 50%. It appears the percentage of R recordings on the list which includes a lot of audiophile labels is probably higher than 80%. Also note that Mapleshade recordings are marked N. Which actually makes sense, you know, that correlates to how they sound. Now, you see why I started my last post with, Houston we have a problem.

Houston we have a problem. Most recordings, including many of the ones audiophiles cherish, actually invert polarity.

Geoff, I have no knowledge of the polarity database you referred to just above, but I would wonder how the polarities it alleges for the various recordings were determined. Was it all based simply on what sounded "right" to the individuals who created the listings? Or did they go to the trouble of examining waveforms on an oscilloscope or a computer? And if the latter, were they thorough enough to examine the phasing of each of the different instruments and/or singers on the recording?

My understanding is that the majority of recordings are neither inverted nor non-inverted. Instead they are a conglomeration of different sounds that are likely to have been mixed together with each of them being phased essentially at random relative to the others.

Take a look at this photo of one of the "state of the art" mastering rooms at Abbey Road Studios, which one of our members called attention to in another recent thread. After what has been captured from a multitude of different mics has been put through all of that equipment and subjected to mixing, compression, limiting, equalization, and most likely numerous other effects, it’s hard to imagine how the end product can have any semblance of meaningful phasing, inverted or not.

It would be a different story, of course, with the relatively small number of recordings that have been engineered with just two or three mics, and with minimal post-processing.

Also, since you mentioned database statistics for the DG label I’ll add, as you probably realize, that over the years many and perhaps most of their recordings have been notorious for heavy-handed multi-mic’ing. With literally dozens of microphones having been used on many of their orchestral recordings, as I understand it. Requiring, btw, a mixing console even more elaborate than the one shown in the photo I linked to.

In any event, though, there are countless other ways in which the recording and mastering process can be less than ideal. Why focus on this one?

As for the other issue that has been under recent discussion in this thread, I too am confused about what the speed of sound in air has to do with amplifier circuitry.

Regards,
-- Al

Al, Here’s the link to the polarity database that George Louis compiled. Draw your own conclusions. The reason I brought this up on this particular thread is because you had just asked what the speed of sound had to do with the price of spinach. Which was actually the question I asked last week on another thread and which Roger answered. The connection of course is that Roger claims that the speed of sound in air should be preserved by the amplifier. With inverted polarity, with the trumpet being sucked instead of blown it’s almost like the Acoustic Waves of the musician’s breath and coming from the trumpet are traveling backwards. So forget about keeping the velocity of sound in air consistent (Roger’s term is Mach 1) between the recording venue and the listening room. Obviously there are other potential issues but if 80 or 90 percent of audiophile type recordings are in fact R then that would be big news. And bad news for Rogers claim that his amp, the way it preserves the speed of sound, is the key to getting "live" sound, since statistically on 20% or so of recordings are in correct polarity.

The situation is further complicated because some recordings that are inverted R will play as N on some systems, since in those systems there is one component that inverts polarity.

http://ultrabitplatinum.com/the-polarity-list/

geoff kait
machina dynamica
no goats no glory

Atmasphere do you know if the MLP label recordings were "inverted"?

I've never heard anything about that.   My understanding is they have the "holographic imaging" the best ones do because they were miked very simply for that (2 or 3 mikes for natural stereo live recordings).

Did they know of and play phasing tricks in the production?

How about more modern champs like Mapleshade or Dorian?

I couldn't say. What I do know is that if you want to do a really good recording, you keep things as simple as possible.

Al, Here's the link to the polarity database that George Louis compiled.  Draw your own conclusions.

The conclusion is of course that this is bunk. George would have had absolutely no way to know one way or the other! One time he came into our room, proclaiming that our system was out of phase (it happened at the time that we were playing Canto General which I had recorded). So I flipped the phase inversion switch. At that point, upon not really hearing a difference, George said that you could not hear it on analog recordings. I had the CD on hand so we played that. Same results. So I'm just going on personal experience here- George had and has no way of knowing so you can ignore that database.