Reversing absolute phase

Just because recording engineers are too lazy to bother with absolute polarity does not mean that having it does not sound better. You are correct that in many multi-miked recordings, some mikes may be out of polarity and others not. I would suggest that the industry should establish a standard.

I don't think I have ever stumbled onto an out of phase recording. I have heard instances where people were not careful and hooked up the cables wrong.

Miswiring is hardly an excuse. Since one polarity is often superior, it is too bad that this issue is ignored.

Dopogue, I have no idea why you would say that inverted and uninverted polarities are identical. On many recordings that just is not true. If by saying that "most speakers are not polarity-coherent" you mean that one driver is inverted, I would say that buyers should avoid them.

Mind you I am not saying that matching the polarity of the recording, if there is one, is a major contribution to the quality of sound, but it certainly adds to that quality.

Eldartford, given that hardly any manufacturer provides a way of inverting the signal, I hardly worry about polarity, but I know from much experience that one direction typically sounds better. Presently I lack any capability to change either digital or analog. It is real shame that there is so much disregard for correct polarity. If recording engineers were less lazy and music companies more concerned, such that we could know that all recordings had say the first oncoming sound as positive polarity, we could all just set our speaker leads one way and forget the problem. Alas, that is very unlikely. I am sure in the digital domain that software could just set every cut to onset positive polarity.

Lewm, I agree under the present circumstances.

Piedpiper, I agree about the degradation. I had a Millennium preamp made by Siltech, with a remote switch to invert. I noticed that the best sound was to invert the speakerwires at the speaker but not on the preamp. It turned out to be an inverting preamp and did use another stage to allow inverting. I was hearing the loss in using the inverted setting. As you say some designs could easily provide this. All line stages with parallel outputs even if they just use a transformer could provide it without an additional stage. Parafeed designs could also.

Would it not be great were recording engineers to chose one polarity and stick to it? All you would have to do would be to decide which you preferred with your speaker connections and stick too it.

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.

Mothra, I don't think there is an industry standard. We have no way to know whether what people prefer in polarity is correct polarity, the best of quite mixed polarities on a given recording, or even incorrect polarity. This is the sad state of affairs given industry indifference concerning polarity.

Unfortunately, most of us lack the easy capability to invert polarity by means that do not degrade the signal.