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The Greatest Case of the Emperor's Ear's in the History of Audio

Posted by georgelouis (M) on December 31, 2006 at 19:35:01

In Reply to: Re: Miscelaneous Polarity Issues posted by Doc Gaw on December 31, 2006 at 05:45:26:

Thus far out of thousands of commercially stamped CDs I’ve only found two that are out of absolute polarity. One of those is the Stereophile Test CD STPH-002-2 but I’m sure there are some others that are worth checking out such as Joni Mitchell- “Blue” but no one bothered to report on their findings. The Stereophile test CD’s track #8 is an absolute polarity test track that goes from in absolute polarity to out of absolute polarity at one minute thirty three seconds and then because the recording engineer forgot to throw the polarity switch back, all the subsequent music tracks are out of absolute polarity. Several months ago on this very forum I asked other music loving audiophiles and inmates to let us all know of any other CDs that maybe out of absolute polarity but so far as I know, no one has posted even one example. Now it is true that some rock music CDs such as some Beatle, Pink Floyd’s, the two CD set “James Taylor Live” in particular have their lead vocalist(s) and lead instrumentalist(s) in opposite relative polarity to the rest of the performers, however, myself and most of my audiophile friends prefer those CDs played in the polarity in which they were stamped but that’s a subjective choice each listener must make for themselves.
I’ve previously listed the EIA microphone polarity standards, the CBS CD-1 Test CD, and the AES standards for maintaining electrical polarity of components from their inputs to outputs so those who say there aren’t any standards simply haven’t been paying attention or much worse purposely are misleading us for their own personal reasons. Since commercial CDs have such a great consistency of polarity that must at least be a de facto standard for absolute polarity even if there’s no written standard.
I’ve gone on record regarding the polarity of Stax headphones, noise canceling and other headphones, Quad speakers, various CD , SACD, and DVD players and no one has proven me wrong or for that matter challenged those polarity calls and in fact some engineers such as John Curl who confirmed that indeed his Stax headphones inverted polarity. I’ve challenged those who would contest my polarity calls and opinions regarding polarity to take the “Louis Test of the Audibility of Relative Polarity” or in lieu of that propose their own test but their silence is deafening and as best I recall silence has no polarity to test. In other words they should put their ears up or shut up.

George S. Louis, Perfect Polarity Punditâ„¢

P.S. It was correctly pointed out that the pit edges are the one’s and are the transitions between pits and lands. That saves space on the disc and makes it irrelevant whether or not the laser pickup sees a convex or concave pit because it doesn’t change a CD’s polarity.

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