Cartridge polarity?


Yesterday I was placing my ZYX cart on another headshell. Somehow I reversed the red/green wires. The sound changed in these ways: separation increased substantially, vocals wandered more to one side and when they were centered, they were less focused, bass decreased in impact but soundstaging increased phenomenally especially depth-wise. When I re-connected the wires correctly, the sound was back to normal. Is there a polarity issue? Should the wires be reversed? If I reverse the wires and the soundstage increase stays along with appropriately centered vocals, will it cause a problem with my system?

The system:
Mitsubishi LT-30
Zyx R100H
Sansui (upgraded, new caps etc) AU-D11 integrated
Kirksaeter 220 speakers
All Vampire CCC wire

Thanks all.
mt10425

Showing 1 response by eldartford

Back when phono was my only source I deliberately connected one cartridge channel backwards, so that it was out of phase. Since most of the signal is common mode in the two channels (mono) this eases the load on the power supply of the power amp. When one channel pulls positive current the other is pulling negative. Of course one set of speaker wires needs to be reversed to get the audio back into phase. An added feature of this scheme is that a center speaker can be connected bridged across the stereo amp. A pot connected between the two channel signals at line level allows the volume of the center speaker to be reduced. Although this puts a low impedance load on the power amp, I never had any problem.

If you hook up your system this way, other source components, eg: tuner, need to be similarly phased, and it becomes a can of worms. For pure phono though, it works great.