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Speaker phase observation and question?

Hi everyone,

After months of playing around with positive phase and reverse phase connections to my Monitor Audio Silver 8 speakers, I have made a couple of observations. When connected in positive phase (red - red, black - black), the speakers put out pretty substantial bass, but the mids and treble are somewhat subdued. Upon reversing the phase, the mids and treble open up substantially, and the bass becomes somewhat subdued. To my ears, I actually prefer the reversed phased.

Moving forward to the current day, I purchased an app that tests phase using a generated tone. In testing my speakers, both bass drivers test positive phase, but the mid and treble test negative. I had read somewhere that some manufactures wire the drivers like this intentionally, but am confused as to whether or not this is the case with my speakers, or if it's a manufacturing flaw?

Any thoughts? 
chewie70
chewie70 OP
17 posts
 
sfall, I don't believe there is anything horribly wrong with my system, this just confirmed what I was hearing and seeing with the polarity test.

To answer your initial question, my rig is Simaudio pre/DAC, Emotiva XPA 2-channel 300wpc amp, and Audio Art single shotgun run cables, with custom jumpers that mirror the cables.

Although I hear substantial differences between lows and highs when changing polarity, the system sounds amazing either way. I think if I could leave the bass in positive polarity, and reverse the polarity of mid/treble, the sound would be perfect. I should note that I am almost completely deaf in one ear; so when I say a "substantial" change, it my just be that I am hearing frequencies differently than others??
chewie70 OP
17 posts
 
Thank you to everyone else that has taken time to comment, this has been for informative.
sfall
346 posts
 
" I think if I could leave the bass in positive polarity, and reverse the polarity of mid/treble, the sound would be perfect. "

I'm not sure I understand what you're doing to change polarity. If you have high order xovers in your speakers, its true that the drivers will start and stop at different times. But keep in mind the designer knows this and factors it into the overall design. Its not something you would ever want to fool with. If you want to change polarity on the entire signal, you probably have a button for this on your Sim. Its a common feature on preamps and dacs. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that what you are doing is wrong, I just can't figure it out.

" Audio Art single shotgun run cables, with custom jumpers that mirror the cables."

I'm not sure what you mean here. Anytime someone says shotgun speaker cables, it means you are running 2 separate pairs of cable from the amp to the speakers. (For ease of connection, you can have the amp ends of the speaker cables terminated to one set of connectors. Its still a shotgun design). So, if this is what you have, the jumpers are not needed. It actually negates most of the positives gained from the double biwire.
erik_squires
16,122 posts
 
OP:

You may want to look into room correction such as DiracLive which can correct this. If you use a PC as a source you may even be able to play with it for free.

Best,

E
asvjerry's avatar
asvjerry
4,679 posts
 
I'll vote with Eric on this...I've been applying room correction for a couple of decades now, adjusting for 'flat' as much as is practical given the existing space, the stuff within it, and the drivers applied to it.  Once one gets 'used to it', it doesn't make sense to do anything else IMHO.

Given my penchant for omnis, I have to do a bit more 'sampling', but I've the means to do so and the method for averaging the samples.  We all have our manias....;)
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