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In Reply to: RE: It's easy, IF your speakers meet certain requirements. posted by Tre' on November 25, 2015 at 08:32:40:
Thanks, Tre, for posting; that's an interesting, and nicely written article you gave the link to. Of course the debate over whether absolute polarity is audible or not continues.It seems to me now that it is in principle plausible that absolute polarity could be audible, since musical instruments can have +/- asymmetric waveforms, and since the human ear presumably must have some degree of +/- asymmetry in its response to pressure peaks and troughs.
What is not clear to me, though, is whether the effects that people report hearing are actually due to the +/- asymmetry of the ear's response, or whether instead the reported effects are due to +/- asymmetries in other parts of the audio chain; the most likely other candidates being the loudspeakers and the amplifiers.
Any of the obvious experiments one could think of performing, such as switching the polarity of the speaker wires, or switching the polarity of the audio signal going into the amplifier, might in fact be doing nothing more than revealing that the loudspeakers distort asymmetrically, or that the amplifier distorts asymmetrically, or both. And even if the sound is nicer for one polarity choice than for the other, does this necessarily mean that that choice is the "correct" one that corresponds to preserving the absolute polarity of the original sound source? Or might it happen that the nice sound happens to coincide with a "wrong" absolute polarity?
If one wanted to establish that there was a genuinely audible effect due to the +/- asymmetry of the ear's response, one would have to find a way of eliminating all the other possible confounding factors associated the the asymmetries of the other components in the chain. I doubt that the typical reported listening tests have really nailed this question. Maybe people are just hearing the effects due loudspeaker or amplifier distortions. Or maybe they really are hearing genuine ear-dependent polarity effects. Who knows?
Chris
Edits: 11/25/15 11/25/15 11/25/15 11/25/15
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Follow Ups
- RE: It's easy, IF your speakers meet certain requirements. - cpotl 11:40:29 11/25/15 (1)
- RE: It's easy, IF your speakers meet certain requirements. - Tre' 18:10:13 11/25/15 (0)
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