Reversing Polarity -- Voodoo or Easy Tweak?

Cwlondon, I understood you in your first post. Few are stupid enough to wire one speaker out of phase with the other. Absolute polarity is a different matter. I wish I had an easy way to have switchable polarity, so that I had a choice, but I don't have. Even cheap digital players used to have this, but no longer. I am not about to change speaker leads for each cd or record.

In the past, on perhaps 10 percent of my records changing the absolute polarity made a great difference. On about 30 percent it made no difference.

Eldartford, I suspect that you are right that would see little difference on a scope. This is always my concern as in some cases I heard a decidedly different sound with a reverse in polarity. I suspect that recording engineers indifference to polarity or multi-miking may contribute to why some records and disks seem unresponsive to such changes. But if recordings in which I hear differences fail to show a difference on a scope, I suspect that you and I would come to different conclusions.

At any rate since I now have no easy way to reverse polarity and some recordings sound much better than others, I can only suffer along. I did have a parafeed output line stage from Exemplar which could easily have had a polarity inverter as it was transformer coupled, but it is not available in the H-Cat. Other tube units that I have had, notably the Siltech Millennium did provide a useless inverter which introduced another tube stage to get the inversion.

I guess I would say that in the past when I had the capability on digital easily compare that about 1 disk in 10 made a difference. I should say that Clark Johnsen also once visited when I had the capability on vinyl and digital. He heard it on more recordings, and when he pointed out what differences he was hearing, others did indeed also hear them.

Trust your ears, Jea48.

So what do you conclude?