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A substantial portion if not most PBS music, is broadcast out of absolute polarity. It may be worth checking out other commercial music broadcast sources including television.Here’s an update regarding the possible reasons that most CD, SACD, and DVD players (95 to 99%) play laser read media out of absolute polarity. Previously, I stated that it’s very likely that the analog to digital conversion of the analog eye pattern of the disc’s digital data is inverted and now I’m adding that a data inversion may also be caused by the digital rate converter. If either the analog to digital converter or the sample rate converter inverts polarity but not both, and the component’s designer maintains the electrical polarity of the data stream through the player’s outputs (per AES protocols because they aren’t aware that the data stream is inverted) that might help explain why the relative polarity distribution of CD playback isn’t 50-50.
Follow Ups:
I think you need some serious help. That and a handful of Prozac might help you with this psychosis you have. Who knows it might even regulate your polarity!!!
Here at the Omaha zoo, we have a polar bear exhibit. The bears do well here, generally. There was one, though, that exhibited some odd behavior. It had periods of very high activity, tearing around the enclosure like mad, playing with the bear toys, swimming, interacting with the other bears, and generally being more energetic than any of the other bears. It also had periods of lethargy, where it moved very little and didn't eat much.Upon investigation, it turned out that it wasn't just a polar bear, it was a bipolar bear.
I dont care who ya are that there is funny.
Thank you.
What exactly am I listening for so as to hear polarity corectness in a recording playback ?How can someone hear [distinguish] that the band is in one polarity and the singer is out?
Will swapping + and - at speakers [both] corect this [if out]or am I way off in my understanding?
P.S. One of the reasons that the new model of RealityCheckCD Audiophile Grade Duplicator™ makes inverted copies is to correct for the 95 to 99% of invertng CD playback equipment including those in motor vehicles.
But what if some of the instruments are in phase and some are out by the engineers choice? Many recordings are like this.
I don't necessarily doubt you but name one in order that we may check it out.George S. Louis, Perfect Polarity Pundit™
Holly Cole Trio: Don't Smoke in BedThe vloce and bass are out of phase to the piano.
Dear Unclestu,I find that "Don't Smoke in Bed" CD is one of the most difficult for me to hear the polarity of the piano because on my system it tends to be somewhat buried in the mix. However, after saying that I think that I’m hearing the piano in the same polarity ( the CD is in absolute polarity) as Holy Cole, the bass, and percussion.
I’d like to know the components in your audio system including the crossover slope of your speaker system as that may shed some sound (light) on your relative polarity call of the piano to the rest of the CD.
"Here’s an update regarding the possible reasons that most CD, SACD, and DVD players (95 to 99%) play laser read media out of absolute polarity."If this were actually the case (I'm sure it isn't), I'd simply get a player or DAC with an "invert" switch, and use it with the switch engaged at all times.
nt.
Or you could stand on your head! I am sure it would be just as beneficial.
Again, George, you fail to understand that there is no standard. What is on the disc depends on all of the gain stages, wiring, fiddling of the engineers,the setup of the disc production plant etc. Since the recording industry has no standard as to what is correct polarity, discs will be in either type.What your system reproduces depends on whether and how many of the pieces of equipment invert polarity.
Thus, it doesn't matter whether your player or system or speakers inverts polarity or not, as about 50% of your recordings will be out on your system and in on somebody else's. The industry and 95%-99% of the listeners don't. Only the true high end fanatic with good ears does. Otherwise every piece of gain or source equipment would have a polarity switch and every recording would have a track with pulses on them so that either the listener or some automatic switch somewhere in the system would determine what's appropriate and send the correct information to the speakers.
Unhappily, that will never occur as the majority of individuals either can't hear it or don't care. So thanks for carrying the polarity banner as any individual on this board who realizes that it is a free improvement to his system will appreciate it, at least until he realizes he may have to change the polarity with every recording or track to get optimal sound.
I think you missed his point here, if in fact he has one.What George is saying is that X% (99% or whatever) of laser disc based playback devices (CDPs, DVDPs etc.) inverse the polarity (compared to what is stored on the disc) when the disc is read and/or the data is processed. It is really meaningless of course and does not do anything to disprove the 50/50 theory of polarity. It only means instead of the distribution being 50/fifty it is now fifty/50. :-)
But all in all you are right of course.
Cheers!
Hi Garth,If George is saying that the datastream itself is inverted, does that turn lands into pits and pits into lands? I don't believe that acoustic polarity can necessarily be changed simply by inverting the digital signal - but it may be possible to make dramatic changes by doing that very thing.
For instance: could a digital word with a value of, say, 0110110100001110 theoretically be changed to a value of 1001001011110001 by a polarity inversion of the data read from the laser or the machester code of the S/PDIF stream? And are these values simply acoustically polar-opposites of the same amplitude value on the same waveform?
I don't think it works that way.
"In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is." - Yogi Berra
Hey Chris!Have we "talked" since the TAN days? I can't recall.
Frankly I don't know enough technically of how a CD works to be able to know if a "polarity inversion" could even take place reading the disc. It would seem to me like there would be a bit used to define the polarity and if that is the case why would it be the only one flopped?
I guess we should ask a digital engineer how and what is swapped when the digital domain "polarity switch" is hit.
In any case I think it is pretty clear George is contending that all or whatever % of machines he thinks it is inverse polarity relative to that which it should be according to what is stored on the disc.
Anything is possible but even if true it makes absolutely no difference, right?
Cheers and HNY!
You are thinking analog here. The digital signal is keyed to the change from 0 to 1, The direction of the change is immaterial for most digital signal storage. However, the Philips Redbook standard, IIRC, assigns a positive polarity to a positive change when going from 0 to 1, and a negative polarity when the signal goes negative from 0 to 1.
For pure data storage, the vector of the change is immaterial. Going from 0 to -1 is the same data wise as going from 0 to +1. Only with the DAC chip convention does this make a difference.Alas, as other have stated, absolute polarity is not easily recognized, nor considered an important issue. Transducer designs with mixed or altered polarities dominate the industry, and most seem to simply accept it is an artifact of reproduced music. That maybe so for a budget system, but in a time where there are speakers reaching atmospheric heights, price wise, I find that inexcusable.
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 Pundit™
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.
from georgelouis: "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."However from the CD notes, quoting John Atkinson/Robert Harley: "We have no idea which way round on Gordon's recording is correct, but we have inverted the polarity somewhere in the middle . . . ."
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.Holy mackerel, George. You need to do a bit of study on how CDs work.
Regards,
Geoff
"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."I've cited CDs of inverted polarity here quite often. Kind of surprised you never saw at least one of them....
Norah Jones "Come Away With Me" and Rush "Exit Stage Left" are two of them..... Dylan's new CD has "mixed" inversion, where Dylan's voice is inverted relative to the rest of the band. The first CD I've encoutered like that.
- http://db.audioasylum.com/cgi/m.mpl?forum=general&n=308143&highlight=Krieger+inverted+CD&r=&session= (Open in New Window)
Dear Todd,Thank you for the useful feedback. The only one of those CDs I have is Nora Jones "Come Away With Me" and if I can find it, I'll report my polarity findings for my example. And I did forget to mention that my 2 and 8GM ipod nano's invert uncompressed 16 bit 44.1KHz music files.
I'd like to know which CD player, speakers, crossover slopes or headphones you listened to the CDs with. And you didn't state which polarity Dylan's voice is in.
HowdyYou continually avoid substantiating your claims.
E.g. http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/general/messages/457676.html
or
http://www.audioasylum.com/audio/general/messages/459598.html
Why should we not just assume you are a complete fraud?
.
You ain't that far off...
Although the symptom is "unnacceptable sound" in people's digital playback, and it seems like George's latest product might be the magic bullet, the nature of the alleged problem and the solution seem too vague. A black hole. More like a Band-Aid than a real solution.The problem is, plain and simple, that vast majority of digital playback products just plain stink. (The recordings too, but the feedback for optimizing recording quality is often the playback.)
And the designers of digital audio products mostly don't have a clue, so instead of technology advancing, it's becoming more and more convoluted. (I also think this why digital playback performance does not correlate much to price- What designers think is better to warrant added expense may not in actuality be better.)
This is why most of my personal playback products are of 1990s vintage, where I think the level of digital playback hit its peak. There is good sounding digital out there, but mostly from that time period.
I think what George is doing is well-intentioned (in spite of this fetish with absolute polarity), and maybe even valuable, in regard to the public awareness that there is a fundamental problem with digital audio playback, which we still don't truly understand.
I'd be happy to review George's new product, but I don't have an urge to try it where I'd be willing to send money to do so. Because from a technical perspective, it's just another application based on mere faith and an impression of improved sonics. And because a ringing first-impression does not necessarily equate to real improvement (an audiophile habit that hits most of us), and the lack of fundamental understanding of the science associated with the new application, the new technology could in reality introduce a new problem instead of a real solution. (Its worst form is where it impacts the products themselves, resulting in big setbacks to the advancement of audio. dCS' introduction of asynchronous sample-rate conversion, with the assistance of an audio press salivating over the notion of "breakthrough" technology, has done exactly that.)
And worst of all, whenver such products are introduced, the perception of a possible solution just around the corner only perpetuates the real problem. Maybe in time, after we realize after all these "breakthroughs" never seem to solve the problems of digital audio playback, we'll finally realize the problem is at its core. Affecting just about every product that has ever been marketed, to varying degrees. The digital audio chips themselves. And until we get a true grasp of the problem (we're getting there, in spite of the digressions), we will not be able to provide proper feedback to those responsible for the core design (the chip manufacturers), so they can apply tangible improvements to their products, which would equate to real improvements in our end products.
I can understand where you're coming from. However, the problem is two fold, in my experience.
The first is that many if not most of the transducers used have mixed polarities, or at the very least, severe timing problems between drivers. That simple issue clouds the perception of most listeners. There are polarity and time aligned designs on the market, but they are not universal. Price has no bearing on their design, BTW.
The second is the recording producers. Recordings are often deliberately recorded with mixed polarity. The Aphex Aural Exciter used by such singers (it is a voice synthesizer) as Linda Ronstadt, Neil Diamond, Barbara Streisand inverts polarity and adds a bit of EQ. Listen to Phil Spector's "Wall of Sound". All he does is to invert the polarity of the background instruments in relation to the singers.
Between the speaker designers and the recording producers, the results are chaotic. With speaker designers, you would think that if perfection and accuracy were the true goal, speaker designs would converge at a certain price point.
The chips are not the problem. The problems lie at both ends of the audio spectrum.Of course your opinions and experiences may differ....
I haven't announced a new product yet but I'm having a prototype PerfectPolarizer™ built that may turn into a real product that will allow the listner to remotely control polarity at line level in both the analog and digital domain as well as do A-B or A-B-X double blind testing of components, polarity, some additional unusual but useful functions.George S. Louis, Perfect Polarity Pundit™
What's the connection between polarity claims and a testimonial on a service for performing miracles?
I would never purchase anything from someone who spams the forums
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