Reversing absolute phase

As one might guess, I agree completely with Eldartford and others who expressed similar sentiments. But it goes back to what I stated above: if you DO care a lot and if you CAN hear the "difference" consistently, get yourself a preamp with a phase switch, preferably on a remote control.

This comes up about once a month. Since there is not and never was an industry "standard" for absolute phase, LPs and even CDs are not consistently created equal with respect to phase. In fact, on an LP, one track can be out of phase (or phase inverted) with respect to the next track. Therefore, if you want phase to be "right" for each and every piece of software, you are going to be jumping up and down a lot swapping the hot and ground connections of your speaker wires, even assuming you can hear the difference. IOW, if your preamp is inverting, it will still be correct about 50% of the time. And if you are obsessed with "proper" phasing, you had best acquire a preamp with a built-in phase switch. Just be sure your L channel is never 180 degrees out of phase (not "polarity") with your R channel. That DOES sound bad.

IMO, there may be no such thing as "correct" polarity on the recording end. There may only be such a thing as one polarity sounding better than the opposite one to a given listener at the other end of the electronic reproduction chain.

Tbg, If you do agree with my statement above, then there is no way that recording engineers could "agree to one polarity and stick to it". I'm not absolutely certain that my assumption is correct (regarding the fact that on the recording side, selecting polarity is not possible due to multiple instruments, multiple mikes, the effects of mixers, room effects, etc), but that's what I wrote. True, the recording engineer could decide whether or not to flip a polarity switch, much as we do on the other end of the repro chain, but he's only altering the polarity of a bunch of mixed sources that in and of themselves most likely are of non-uniform polarity.