@mahgister Thank you for that long quote. I won’t rise to the bait about double-blind testing as I can see it applies only to subjective listening tests here.
I am fascinated by the information about the eighth cranial nerve, however. It seems to imply we live in a half-wave world, but on thinking for a moment I realise that just because the hair cells in the cochlea trigger on the positive phase, it does not stop them from faithfully reporting to the cochlear nuclei the whole waveform. And when brainstem auditory evoked potentials are recorded, they are indeed whole positive and negative waveforms. Now that would imply only a difference on the first oscillation of a musical signal when phase is reversed, but if the double-blind test says we can tell the difference there must be more to it.
Interesting stuff! It makes me wonder if the reason that some uncomplicated recordings (I mean a Blumlein pair of microphones, not post-processing or manipulation, like the old Opus 3 recordings) sound so good because there is no opportunity to introduce various tracks that are out of phase?