No offense, but that is simply not true. I have an ear for phase and used to walk into stereo departments of "low fidelity" stereo stores and immediately realize some stereo salesman had hooked up speakers out of phase. I'd quickly reverse the wires on one speaker, sometimes while they were protesting, and explain afterwards what I was doing. I would then help them to understand how to hear it. Reduced bass is only part of it. Heck, I even created an active surround sound synthesizer for my car stereo back in the early 70's by messing with phase. It worked pretty well.
Now, if you mean there may be a SLIGHT phase mismatch, that is something else entirely. The phase is not reversed, however.
OK, I was hoping to avoid having to go into all this, but here goes: (BTW, this isn't a personal attack or argument, but something I want to share with everyone)
Yes, most people can hear when one speaker is wired correctly, and the other isn't. That's a given, a point I won't disagree with, but that wasn't what I was talking about. But follow me here, the exact reason you can hear it will prove what I'm about to talk, well, about...
1. This is the most important point to I want to try get across is this: "Phase" and "Polarity" are NOT the same thing at all. How did they become confused? Test signals. A sine wave or a square wave are most often used, and looking at them on an oscilloscope screen, it truly is impossible to tell if they are 180º out of phase or inverted polarity. So what's the difference?
Phase refers to moving the wave backwards or forwards in time relative to another wave, that's all. That's also the reason you want your speakers the same distance from your head when listening
. If you are a vocal, wind instrument, or fretless string musician, learning to listen for phase shift is how you tune your instrument as you play. For those not familiar, these instruments don't have a fixed pitch like a keyboard, so for the player, "tuning" is something done constantly on the fly as you play. It's not as hard as it sounds really.
Polarity is different, it literally means flipping the wave over, up becomes down, down becomes up. Easy to do electrically, basically impossible in nature as far as sound goes. Sound waves are compressions of air, followed by the air returning to its natural state. In other words, there's no vacuum in between the pressure waves. If it were possible to see it rendered accurately, electrically, on a scope, none of the wave would come close to the 0V line. I think Nelson Pass discusses some of this in his newest article "Leaving Class A" on his website. I read it, but I was kind of tired when I did. Point being, every natural sound we hear begins with a pressure wave. Electrically that means the signal has to go from 0V upwards, which should push the speaker cone out. If it goes in, you won't hear anything at all until the air rushes in to fill in the vacuum created, and that's quite a bit after the cone actually moved.
2. Two very helpful courses I took as an undergrad were physics of the arts, and electronic music. The electronic music class was "old school", the most advanced bit of equipment we were allowed to use (which FORCED us to be creative) was an old ARP Odyssey. Most acoustic instruments, as well as voice, naturally produce sound waves that have a sawtooth shape, not sine or square. Clarinet and some organ pipes are about the only acoustic instruments that naturally produce sound waves that are square-shaped. Dr. Douglas taught us that 90% or so of what the human ear perceives as timbre is determined by the very first attack of the very first wave hitting your ear. He did a tape-loop demo with us in class where we recorded an oboe, an alto saxophone, and a trumpet (me) all playing a 440Hz "A". It was easy to tell us apart with the tape loops as is, but when he went back and cut the first half-inch out of our sounds on the tape, all of a sudden you couldn't tell who was who anymore. You could tell they weren't exactly the same sounds, but you couldn't identify the specific instrument.
SO, (if you're still with me here
) if your system inverts polarity, you will lose at least the front half of the first sound wave, and the rest may be distorted by air rushing in to fill the vacuum.
3. If you are curious as to whether or not your CD player inverts polarity (most do), listen to a recording you know really well with the system set up as it is, then turn the amp off, flip the speaker wires (positive for negative, not left channel for right channel), turn the system back on and listen to the recording again.
If the vocals are easier to understand, or the instruments sound more realistic, or the drums have more "kick", or the bass goes a little deeper, or the cymbals sound a lot better, or the system sounds "faster", or all of the above, your CD player inverts polarity.
So, the point of my earlier post was, a correctly set up turntable is correct polarity, and most commercial CD players are not. It was my contention that this accounted for why most people perceived a huge difference between the quality of a turntable and a CD player.
Now I'm going to rest my fingers a bit....:yes:
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