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Absolute polarity, is it audible ?

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In 6moon's Auroville archive, Srajan mentions in Auroville 20 the "Wood effect" and that absolute polarity is clearly audible to "those experts".

I obtained a copy of Clark Johnson's AES paper, read a few of the references cited therein, re-read Greiner's JAES paper "Observations on the audibility of acoustic polarity"..

I then wanted to know. So I did the test at home. My preamp has a phase inverse swich for the left channel, so I pressed the mono switch, muted the right speaker and put the EBU SQAM CD in the player.

I played several of the tracks , such as pink noise, electronic gong (100Hz, 400Hz), triangle, grand piano, trumpet, marimba, gong, speech and I could not hear any difference between the two positions of the switch.

What does that mean ? Is it an issue of my hearing or is it an issue of my audio system.

Dan Shanefield wrote in the letter section of Audio Magazine 1990 :

"in case the effect turns out to be strongly audible, the speakers should be checked for unusually high 2nd-harmonic distortion, which would be an extraneous factor that could artificially make it audible".

"Although it might be a reasonable idea to establish a standard for absolute polarity - as suggested in the reviewed book (Clark Johnson's "Wood effect")-, careful experiments have shown so far that it is not audibly important and , in many cases, it is completely inaudible."


Greiner's paper was published in 1994, has there been other publications after that date on the polarity issue ?


In any case my conclusion is that I can't hear it on my system, so I don't worry.


Klaus

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Topic - Absolute polarity, is it audible ? - Klaus 04:45:00 09/10/03 (65)
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