herb
brain's right hemisphere
Idiot,
Absolute Polarity - Anyone else can hear a significant difference?
- Thread starter tuga
- Start date
Idiot,
Joe P
Memory Alpha incarnate | mod; Shatner number = 2
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
Joe, being Canadian, is probably too polite to say this, so I will: you are closer to the humourless tw@s than you think.
It’s your post. Delete it yourself.
paulfromcamden
Baffled
Joe, don't let it phase you. The negative vibes are cancelled out by the positive ones.
Joe P
Memory Alpha incarnate | mod; Shatner number = 2
Thanks, dudes.
I'm not phased — see what I did there? — but I am a bit miffed that I spent an hour on the weekend farting about with the invert phase button on my SACD player only to discover I can't reliably hear a difference between a recording sucking or blowing. Mind you, I'm running 64-year-old Tannoys with a cartilaginous fish-shaped valve amp, so who knows if phase is detectable through such kit.
Joe
I'm not phased — see what I did there? — but I am a bit miffed that I spent an hour on the weekend farting about with the invert phase button on my SACD player only to discover I can't reliably hear a difference between a recording sucking or blowing. Mind you, I'm running 64-year-old Tannoys with a cartilaginous fish-shaped valve amp, so who knows if phase is detectable through such kit.
Joe
herb
brain's right hemisphere
Classical music? Did you read my post? What digital player? Philips used ESLs early on and Tannoys are not too analytic of the midrange, more bass revealing for electric bass and drum kit, which is not important for classical music.
tuga
Legal Alien
It is in no way or form identical.
I'm afraid it is me old china!
Without any reference about the phase written on the recording cover or album notes, there is no way the average Audiophile would know which phase was used. Same as Record EQ, without any reference about what EQ was used in the recording process there is no way any audiophile would know either. The results of both are purely subjective for the reasons mentioned by others earlier in the thread.
Addendum: With Record EQ, some say it is obvious what EQ was used, as X EQ sounds better than Y EQ. This means bugger all, as it is purely speculative and subjective, unless or course the EQ used is documented on the album cover.
tuga
Legal Alien
martin clark
pinko bodger
Littoraly, or is a deep-dive required ..?
George J
Herefordshire member
This is an interesting question. Absolute phase. ...
But completely unanswerable. Stereo phase congruence is crucial for imaging in a sensible way, but no person knows if the original recording is in absolute phase, or even if the retakes are in the same phase as the original first take, recorded weeks or months later. Indeed how can anyone decide if absolute phase has any relevance if the bass drum is recorded from behind [Bass kick drum] or in front as it would actually be heard in the audience. Bass kick drums are often recorded from the kick side [ie behind] from the audience perspective so as to guarantee the actual thwack of the impact of the hammer.
Then you get to recording high above a string section [of a symphony orchestra].
Basically at 180 degrees to the action of the strings on the bridge? How to answer that. French horns fire to the back. How to answer that?
Electric guitars have a pick-up, which might be fifty-fifty of the phase you might expect.
The only phase coherence that is relevant is that the same phase must exist on stereo pairs of speakers, but in mono it simply does not matter.
Best wishes from George
But completely unanswerable. Stereo phase congruence is crucial for imaging in a sensible way, but no person knows if the original recording is in absolute phase, or even if the retakes are in the same phase as the original first take, recorded weeks or months later. Indeed how can anyone decide if absolute phase has any relevance if the bass drum is recorded from behind [Bass kick drum] or in front as it would actually be heard in the audience. Bass kick drums are often recorded from the kick side [ie behind] from the audience perspective so as to guarantee the actual thwack of the impact of the hammer.
Then you get to recording high above a string section [of a symphony orchestra].
Basically at 180 degrees to the action of the strings on the bridge? How to answer that. French horns fire to the back. How to answer that?
Electric guitars have a pick-up, which might be fifty-fifty of the phase you might expect.
The only phase coherence that is relevant is that the same phase must exist on stereo pairs of speakers, but in mono it simply does not matter.
Best wishes from George
Did you read my post #48
I gave my views about it in that post. The subject was done and dusted for me over 25 years ago...
tuga
Legal Alien
Joe P
Memory Alpha incarnate | mod; Shatner number = 2
I did read your reply but as ever it was incorrect and you totally missed the point about record EQ. Your mention of RIAA summed it up nicely. The point was that post 1955 when the stereo record came out, all record companies were supposed to adopt the RIAA standard and a lot of them "supposedly" didn't right up until the 1970s. My point was: people can debate what Record EQ was used by the various record companies based on what sounded correct to them on playback. In reality unless the EQ used was written on the record cover or was quoted by the record companies (Record Companies wouldn't admit to using anything other than RIAA EQ because they had all signed up to adopting the RIAA standard), the general public including audiophiles can't be 100% sure what EQ was used. If another EQ was preferred sound wise, then without knowing what EQ was used, it would only be speculation that some other EQ had been used. This is exactly the same as your post about "Phase". Unless it is documented what phase was used during a recording, anything else is pure speculation, which is exactly the same as trying to establish what record EQ was used on some recordings.
For your information Record Equalisation, certainly on playback is accurate, accurate enough for domestic replay when you consider other aspects of the replay chain like speaker crossovers for example. In a phono stage it is possible to get within 0.1dB to 0.2dB across the audio band, even 0.5dB is good enough for vinyl replay in a normal domestic room where many other acoustic factors dominate. I have both analogue and digital sources, very good ones too, and my preferences are that vinyl replay with all its warts, still gives the most enjoyable and communicative musical replay experience.
I think you might be living in the past if you think vinyl has been replaced by digital. I'm leaving it there as I have a business to run, one that involves making phono stages so that people can enjoy listening to their record collections...
Sue Pertwee-Tyr
Accuphase all the way down
This may be so (I certainly agree that record companies were 'supposed' to use RIAA) but given that using the 'wrong' EQ will add distortion to an already distorted signal, and as hifi nerds we're alert to distortion, it's not a major leap of faith to recognise that if a non-RIAA curve sounds more natural (instrumental tonality being the most obvious victim) then it's a decent bet that that's the appropriate EQ curve. I know we can't know for sure, but there are other things we set by ear (VTA, VTF) so it's not without precedent. If solo violin sounds screechy and thin, I know it doesn't sound like that in real life, or on other records. I can blame the pressing, mastering, or the system; but if using a different EQ curve fixes it, that's surely the likely culprit? I've heard a couple of preamps/phono stages which offer different curves (Decca, Columbia, RIAA most obviously) and it's not a subtle thing, IME.
Using the wrong EQ will not add distortion. It will be no different to using tone controls and adjusting the balance of sound to your liking, which is basically what the different EQ's do. If you have a good phono stage there will be extremely low distortion on analogue playback and certainly not one the human ear would detect. I don't want to get into the Record EQ debate as that has been done to death by many over the years and is not relevant to this thread. Some like Michael Fremer who have spoken at length to the record producers, so "came from the horses mouth" statements have already been made and documented. I researched this subject over 20 years ago and produced the Tron Seven Mono phono stage in 2007. Tron is one of the very few companies that actually produced a dedicated mono phono stage with switchable EQ's to satisfy a number of clients, mostly clients from the USA who were using two tonearms and high quality mono cartridges, see below:
herb
brain's right hemisphere
Simply not true. I was using a Garrard/QUAD33/303/ESL57 system from 1974, I found that by changing the polarity of the speaker connections changed the sound very substantially. Why? I was confused. The penny dropped that classical music sounded distanced on some recordings but not others. This was important to me and I had to indicate the polarity on each sleeve to get the correct presentation. In 1994 I found the same problem with a Naim CD3 player and did the same.
I no longer use LPs and in 2007 found that to my relief a CDX2 showed no difference when swapping speaker leads over.
Speculation or experience? Give it a rest.
OUT
chiily
PFM Special Builder
This is an honest question, not sarcasm.
Did you ever find someone else to correlate your findings through listening, or have evidence to confirm that the music was recorded in a particular polarity?
Just wondered if it was a personal thing or an actual thing?