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In Reply to: Re: Miscelaneous Polarity Issues posted by Todd Krieger on December 30, 2006 at 21:49:34:
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.
Follow Ups:
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!
Garth
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.
Stu
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.
George S. Louis, Perfect Polarity Pundit™
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