Speaker phase observation and question?


Hi everyone,

After months of playing around with positive phase and reverse phase connections to my Monitor Audio Silver 8 speakers, I have made a couple of observations. When connected in positive phase (red - red, black - black), the speakers put out pretty substantial bass, but the mids and treble are somewhat subdued. Upon reversing the phase, the mids and treble open up substantially, and the bass becomes somewhat subdued. To my ears, I actually prefer the reversed phased.

Moving forward to the current day, I purchased an app that tests phase using a generated tone. In testing my speakers, both bass drivers test positive phase, but the mid and treble test negative. I had read somewhere that some manufactures wire the drivers like this intentionally, but am confused as to whether or not this is the case with my speakers, or if it's a manufacturing flaw?

Any thoughts? 
chewie70

Showing 3 responses by kalali

Polarity is absolute; + or -, phase angle varies as a function of the frequency. Completely different concepts.
Sorry, for those of us that are a bit slow, the phase angle of a speaker obviously changes with frequency and so does the impedance. Furthermore, it appears that a combination of a low phase angle and low impedance puts "stress" on the partnering amplifier. So, this begs the question why would a "good " speaker designer design a speaker that would create such condition. In other words, how does sound quality - whatever that means in objective terms, benefit from such design.
Thanks for the excellent and thorough explanations. I had completely missed the interrelationship between the impedance and phase angle and voltage/current interplay referenced in the posts. It all makes sense now.