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

While it’s somewhat interesting that instruments can sometimes be in different polarities on the same track and that sometimes tracks can be in different polarities on the same recording what is most important is whether the recording’s Absolute Polarity is Correct or Inverted. Especially if it’s the entire label that’s Inverted! Hel-loo!

There isn’t much you can do about the former cases, since those errors were made during the recording session. However, the latter case of *Absolute Polarity* of a CD being right or wrong relative to a playback system that has been determined to be in correct Absolute Polarity (using a test CD). Either a Polarity switch or the patience to change + and - cables would work. The alternative way would be to make the playback system’s *Absolute Polarity* Inverted. Then, presumably at least according to George Louis, most CDs will sound correct Polarity wise.

Great, let's pick two and reverse our speakers and see who cares.

Actually let me look for old threads on this, and then if not, let's have a group listening test.

See who cares, or thinks this is at all an earth moving issue.

Best,
E

Polarity has some effect, but it has more to do with pressurization of the room than imaging IME.

If you want to properly test this and you have balanced analog cables in your system somewhere, then there is a simple tool:

Just solder a female and male XLR connector together and connect pins 2 and 3 between them.  Make 2.  Insert this into your cabling.

Test with the same track, with and without the adapter.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

This just in! From Clark Johnsen, author of the book on Absolute Polarity, The Wood Effect.

From Clark’s Diary over on Positive Feedback from some time in cyberspace,

Masked by random combination with other distortions in the music reproduction chain, an unsuspected major contributor has lain hidden: Aural sensitivity to "phase inversion", the Wood effect.

Musical instruments normally create compression waves in their attack transients. Electronics, however, often invert that natural, positive polarity to negative, unnatural rarefaction as emitted from loudspeakers, thus diminishing physical and aesthetic impact. The term Absolute Polarity uniquely describes the correct arrival to the ear of acoustic wavefronts from loudspeakers, with respect to actual musical instruments.

Wrong polarity, when isolated, is obvious to almost everyone. Its present neglect results primarily from habitual disregard for linear phase response in loudspeakers, due largely to the erroneous auditory theory of Helmholtz.