help with absolute phase

Dekay, there is nothing wrong with your system. Quite the contrary; it no doubt has the kind of resolving ability that makes it painfully obvious when you've got the phase wrong. When the bass and "stage" are dramatically reduced, and the recording sounds "boxed in," I know I've got the absolute polarity reversed. It does seem to be a bit harder to tell on some recordings than others, though.

As a postscript to my last post, I wanted to mention an idea that my brother and I tossed around some time ago. Before I owned a component with a polarity reversing switch (Theta thinks it's important enough that they include them on their DACs) I wondered whether it was possible to make one's own polarity inverting cable by simply reversing the conductors at one end when soldering. Is this what Mapleshade has done? It occurred to me that if you owned a source component with dual outputs, you could feed them to two different inputs on your preamp; one would have the correct polarity, and the other would be inverted. Voila! Instantly selectable polarity. One further note on whether or not absolute polarity makes a difference; let's say you're listening to a piece of classical music on a great audio system. You've paid countless thousands of dollars to have components that are "fast," that is, that have great transient response because of short rise time, colossal slew rate and all of that. But you're listening to a recording that has the absolute polarity reversed, and when the percussionist whacks that huge bass drum in the midle of The Rite of Spring, your woofers initially suck in instead of blowing air out. You've lost some impact, have you not? A good audiophile should always be able to tell the difference between "suck" and "blow."

Dekay: Don't forget that power cords, like every other piece of wire, take a certain amount of time to break in. The last time I changed power cords it took several days for the improvement to become apparent. You can't pass judgement on a power cord or interconnect cable until it's been in your system for awhile, some say around 400 hours of actual use. BTW, I purchased my Parasound 2000 preamp largely because it had a phase reversing switch on the remote. Shortly afterward, I read that phase inverting switches add an additional circuit -- to say nothing of the switch itself -- into the signal path. More garbage between you and the music = BAD! For this reason, the Parasound has an alternative direct output that bypasses the phase inverting function for serious listening. You can't win. It's helpful, however, to be able to determine the phase setting that sounds the best on a recording-to-recording basis right from your listening chair, and then mark it right on the jewel case for the CD. Regrettably, this really only works fairly well with classical recordings, and even then, only with a good one. In a multi-mic recording, mics may be out of phase with one another. On the pop music side, I have a Joni Mitchell CD where the absolute polarity jumps around from cut to cut. Pop albums are frequently recorded in multiple studios, with the master carried around the world to have tracks added. Off to Nashville to have a rhythm guitar track added, then off to someplace else to record the horns, etc. Fleetwood Mac, for example, is notorious for this. By the time you pop that CD into your system, God only knows WHAT you’ve got.