Riddle me this....

Going Postal on this one!

The effect can happen to an extent if your speakers are phase coherent.

Ever turn binoculars around and see how things now seem more distant than the usual close up?

Reversing polarity of both speakers has that kind of effect. 

But, its more like hearing what the nearfield mics pick up situated right next to the instrument vs listening to music in a room with some distance. That's what I perceive on my system.

Jea48,

Thanks for providing me the most useful information.

The Six Moons article explained it so even I understood it!

@jea48 

+1 Couldn't agree more.  May not make much difference on let's say organ music, but any percussive sound "needs" to start out as a push.  That is how you would hear it live.

Regards,

barts

@mahgister Thank you for that long quote. I won’t rise to the bait about double-blind testing as I can see it applies only to subjective listening tests here.

I am fascinated by the information about the eighth cranial nerve, however. It seems to imply we live in a half-wave world, but on thinking for a moment I realise that just because the hair cells in the cochlea trigger on the positive phase, it does not stop them from faithfully reporting to the cochlear nuclei the whole waveform. And when brainstem auditory evoked potentials are recorded, they are indeed whole positive and negative waveforms. Now that would imply only a difference on the first oscillation of a musical signal when phase is reversed, but if the double-blind test says we can tell the difference there must be more to it.

Interesting stuff! It makes me wonder if the reason that some uncomplicated recordings (I mean a Blumlein pair of microphones, not post-processing or manipulation, like the old Opus 3 recordings) sound so good because there is no opportunity to introduce various tracks that are out of phase?