Riddle me this....

@stringreen ....a mailbox....(but not limited to corners for quite awhile)

@dogberry

It‘s precisely the initial pulse of the wave that defines phase, or for the purposes of this discussion more accurately polarity. Think of a wind instrument being blown rather than sucked ( in analogy to a speaker Diaphragm moving out rather than being sucked in with the corresponding air flow. And it is audible despite what certain theorists claim ex cathedra.

Just as an aside: this is the major advantage of a point source over multiple speaker units interfering with each others‘ phase.

Explain to me why the phase switch ought to be in the digital domain, as opposed to the analog domain in a fully balanced analog circuit, where ground floats. That's assuming of course that one only wants to be able to change phase by 180 degrees.  If one wants to change phase by other parameters, e.g., 90 degrees, 270 degrees or etc, then of course that is best done digitally.  But here we are talking about the effect of changing phase by 180 degrees. 

My ESLs are full range with no crossover. Is that phase coherent?

How would you get absolute polarity if  some instruments were recorded in phase and some out of phase on the same song, I wouldn't doubt if this happens when recording at multiple recording studios.

In the analogue domain it‘d have to be mechanical and thereby more accident prone, I guess…Where polarity is messed up during recording, there‘ll be a change in degrees with in most cases one setting preferable. Since the advent of hi-res audio, polarity consistency seems to have moved into focus for recording engineers.