Benz cartridge phase?

Only if you wire them wrong at the headshell

Do you know if any other component in your system inverts polarity? If you have another one (an even number) do nothing as two negatives make a positive.

You should do what I do... listen to your favorite recordings both ways and see which way sounds better and more natural to you. You can do this simply by reversing the respective positive and negative speaker leads for each channel.

You can then leave the leads at the speaker the way it sounds best. However if you also have a CD player or other source in the system that doesn't invert then you need to invert the phono leads at the cartridge. Then you can leave the speaker leads in normal polarity for CD.

Thanks for the good advice, I will give it a try. If I end up needing to swap the cartridge leads which colours do I change?

Never heard of such a thing with the Benz. As others have mentioned, only if you wire it wrong in the head shell. If your phono or line stage preamp has a polarity switch, experiment with that to see if you notice a change, for the better. I noticed that on some music the playback sounds very flat and little lifeless, nothing like switching the phase on the preamp to take care of that. You will notice out of phase music by this certain flatness and lack of dynamic expression. Once the phase is correct, all harmony in the music life will ve restored. Good luck.

Audioquest4life

One fly in the ointment here. Even if your system maintains correct polarity, recorded media doesn't. Many vinyl LPs and even some CDs are recorded in inverted polarity. Mostly it's the older LPs, but I've had some recent issues that were inverted. It's nice to be able to invert polarity with a remote, ;~) like I can with my phono pre. For CDs, if you have them archived on a hard drive a program like Pure Music will invert polarity for you if you tell it to in the comment box of the iTunes info file. Nice to have the automation there.

It's interesting why this business with polarity makes a difference. Air is a non-linear medium. Just look at the adibatic pressure/volume curves for air. The result is that the sound wave is distorted asymetrically. The peaks are compressed and the troughs are elongated if I remember correctly. This results in even order harmonic distortion, mostly 2nd order. Kind of like what a SET amp does. Inverting this will turn things around, elongated peaks and compressed troughs. So the difference.