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In Reply to: RE: When is someone going to make a device to allow quite changes of polarity? nt posted by Norm on September 21, 2008 at 06:58:28
A polarity inversion capability is common is PC audio, typically a feature of player software. Two of the players that I use have this capability: foobar2000 and cPlay. Unlike when this function is done at line level in a preamp, there are no extra gain stages and no audible effect on sound quality that I have been able to detect, other than inverting polarity. On my system this makes some recordings sound better and others worse, and on some it doesn't seem to make much difference.
Tony Lauck
"Perception, inference and authority are the valid sources of knowledge" - P.R. Sarkar
Follow Ups:
I hope it is nothing that you have to choose before ripping.
...how do you do achieve polarity inversion in Foobar2000? Does it require a plug-in, or is there a setting somewhere in the preferences?
Btw, should I now only mention that I like Diana Krall whenever a "Guilty Pleasures" thread appears on the forum :-), Or is there a DKA (Diana Krallaholics Anonymous)..."Hi, My Name is Welly and I'm a Krallaholic"
Cheerswelly
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
The link will get you the Simple Polarity Inverter for foobar2000. It is a plug-in for Foobar2000 and you enable it by making it an active DSP, in which case both stereo channels are inverted.
I believe there is a newer version on the web site that allows selective inversion of individual channels as well, but I haven't tried it.
Tony Lauck
"Perception, inference and authority are the valid sources of knowledge" - P.R. Sarkar
I was going to ask you the same question but didn't need to. Tried it last night and managed for the first time to actually get some acceptable sound from Foobar. I suppose it just takes convolution with -1 but somehow I'd never gotten around to trying to figure out how to do it and hadn't been able to find a done one.
I'm rather surprised that SW players don't incorporate polarity control as a feature. It would be practical for them to automatically apply the user's preference on a track basis and so should satisfy folks who are fussy about such things far better than a HW player.
Rick
It would be logical to add polarity as a file attribute, just like replay gain can be added to a file. That way, the default could be automatically applied by player software when this feature is enabled. One would only have to ascertain the correct polarity once. Like replay gain, this parameter could be easily changed without rewriting the entire file and without loss of any original information.
Of course, if one doesn't mind changing one's files, one can actually reverse the polarity of samples using an audio editor without adding any additional parameters or using special player software. One can use any audio editor with this capability, for example Sony SoundForge. However, there are two problems with this: (1) flipping polarity is not a light weight operation as it involves altering every sample in the file, and (2) it is not completely lossless if the file happens to have a sample that is exactly at the negative limit. (The negative limit of RBCD is -32768, while the positive limit is +32767.) One version of one player had a bug in its polarity reversal software related to this exception which was fixed after I reported it.
Tony Lauck
"Perception, inference and authority are the valid sources of knowledge" - P.R. Sarkar
Thanks
Cheerswelly
Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
Now your pigs can sing with proper polarity. :-)
Tony Lauck
"Perception, inference and authority are the valid sources of knowledge" - P.R. Sarkar
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