Invert ?

There was a booklet that made the rounds several decades ago, called The Wood Effect. Who knows, it may still be in print, or available through an online book vendor. The topic was absolute phase- and a number of examples were given as I recall. But, as another member here astutely pointed out, most stuff is multi-tracked, often recorded and mixed in various studios, whether all that stuff when mixed down is in the same phase was pretty doubtful. I do remember one example being that old warhorse- Dusty's Look of Love. Was the horn blowing or sucking? (rhetorical music question, not a value judgment). It's one of those quandaries that is probably impossible to solve. 

However, in previous systems, there seemed to be only modest effect by hitting the invert switch. In my current system, I leave it non-inverted and if I hit invert, it does not sound right. I'm not sure what that means, but I just don't mess with it. 

The booklet The Wood Effect was written by Clark Johnsen. If you do a search you will find a number of sources that discuss this topic. I had met Clark a number of times at audio shows as he made it a point of coming to our room to hang out. He also always made a point of saying that if your ears were not sensitive to absolute phase in recordings that you should consider yourself very fortunate.

I responded to Clark when he was writing for Positive Feedback. I believe our conversations were about polarity. Eventually we became friends. He would come to Ft Lauderdale and stay at my house: GOOD TIMES. I have several copies of The Wood Effect

Clark Johnsen has written a lot of pieces about absolute phase and polarity. He was a lot of fun to hang out with at the Las Vegas shows and we often had dinner with him and a few other industry folks, including the late Arthur Loesch, at a local Las Vegas restaurant. Sad that he is no longer with us but this thread has motivated me to seek out some of his work.

@clio09- I did a cursory search- the booklet-- which was around 99 pages, now sells for astronomical numbers as an out of print publication. There are other things, though- listening tests, which I believe were done after the booklet, are in the AES archive-- free to members, otherwise a 30+ dollar monograph. I think there were a few articles, perhaps interviews as well, in the legacy press. Pretty easy to find on an open web search.

After I posted initially, about why my current system sounds terrible in invert mode, I realized that I had wired the system to run the midrange horn directly from my Lamm SETs(no Xover either), then jumpered the tweeters and woofers out of phase to the mid horn. The additional sub woofers are also dialed in to adjust delay/phase.

So, the system coheres as set up, but invert-- not good sounding.