Stereophile test CD2 In/Out of Phase test:question

Tbg...France being screwed up needs no explanation. Australia is geographically inverted, so that explains them.

By the way one could take issue with your presumption that the initial pressure disturbance is positive. How about a gong, or less obviously a drum. (Any bipole source). The initial pressure disturbance polarity will depend on where the listener is located relative to the source.

Many years ago I traveled through the Suez canal, and I observed that the initial water disturbance (wave) due to the moving ship, as measured by water movement at the edge of the canal was down. This is counterintuitive. Although I was an Engineer for four decades I never quite figured out this phenomena that I observed when I was about eleven years old.

El, can you recommend any audiophile gong recordings so I can test your hypothesis.

Herman...see http://www.holistic-resonance.com/index2.html

That's amazimg. I need to get out more. I have a recording of Tibetan finger bells, but I had no idea there was so much interest in the gong.

JBL are not the only ones!
I quote from the owqners manual of my Tannoy Little Red Monitor:
"Absolute Polarity
The convention on all Tannoy loudspeakers is as follows:
A positive going signal (ie =ve terminal of 1.5 volt cell) connected to the positive input terminals of the loudspeaker cause LF cone to move into cabinet. In this way, the absolute polarity of the signal from microphone to loudspeaker may be preserved."

Funny that it is JBL and Tannoy, two companies who have probably done more fundamental research into acoustics than all the others combined, would wire their speakers that way.