Reversing absolute phase

were the world that simple.

Tbg, If you do agree with my statement above, then there is no way that recording engineers could "agree to one polarity and stick to it". I'm not absolutely certain that my assumption is correct (regarding the fact that on the recording side, selecting polarity is not possible due to multiple instruments, multiple mikes, the effects of mixers, room effects, etc), but that's what I wrote. True, the recording engineer could decide whether or not to flip a polarity switch, much as we do on the other end of the repro chain, but he's only altering the polarity of a bunch of mixed sources that in and of themselves most likely are of non-uniform polarity.

Lewm, I just don't believe it is all that difficult. I helped mic a recording session of a jazz festival while at FSU. We checked at all balanced cables were wired correctly, that all the mics when we blew into them showed the correct output on the hot wire, and once all of that was done that we adjusted for any inverting stage. It took more time than ignoring any of this, but not much.

My leanring curve has shot right up, but I'm not 100% sure about what?

Thanks anyway for the intriguing discussion.

As a recording engineer myslef I agree with Tbg. You just have to know for sure what the poarity of your equipment is. The only caveat is when you're multi-micing with lots of bleed which is something to avoid anyway for this very reason. It is obviously easier the fewer mics and outbaord equipment you use. There is a standard as I mentioned above. It's just that most engineers don't pay enough attention to ensuring it all the way down the line to the point of it being a crap shoot whether any given recording is phase coherent within a given cut, throughout the allbum, or given phase coherency, which polarity it's in. So the question as I see it is not whether it could be but whether the industry could be effectively improved.