Crossing Left and Right Speakers

Folks want to confuse absolute phase which can be inverted either by a switch on the pre-amp, source, etc. The result of a change of absolute phase is typically minor and in order for it to be heard the source (disc usually) must have been recorded 'in phase' and often its not, as often some cuts in the disc are and some are not.

The 'phase' I was referring to was the relationship of the speakers to each other which occurs when each speaker is wired up identically, i.e. pos on speaker 1 and pos on speaker 2 - negative on speaker 1 and negative on speaker 2. You can invert this phase relationship by switching the connectors on both speakers i.e. neg on speaker one to pos and neg on speaker 2 to pos. If you do this, and its commonly done to facilitate a tube preamp which inverts phase, you will still maintain the imaging that you had before the phase was inverted.

Since the OP is loosing his center image I can not but conclude that some where in his moving wires etc in shifting his amps that he has misconnected his stuff and now has/had the speakers out of phase (not inverted). Make sense to you? :-)

I was always of the general impression that soundstage was a relationship between space (audio reflections - both as captured in the recording and from our space), time (frequency - and how it interacts with space and nth order reflections), and our brains attempt to make sense out of things and line them back up when information feels like it’s missing.  By flipping the channels in an audio piece you are familiar with, could the brain be more preoccupied with trying to the push the left back into the right channel? The relatively small imperfections, which the brain would normally interpret as a range of frequencies being narrow / wide / up / down / forward / back, is now such a subtle discrepancy in the music compared to the glaring problem of the drums being on the wrong side of the room.  

Have you tried this with a piece you are not familiar with? Do that for a few weeks, get accustomed to the soundstage as presented, and then switch back to the correct channels. 

Otherwise, this makes absolutely no sense to me. 

@jimmy2615 - Your experience is a perfect example of "everything matters" and doesn't make any logical sense unless you assume that there are other unknown factors in play.

Any difference in sound should be expected to result from variances in your components (very minor), unbalanced room acoustics (potentially very significant unless you have a nearly symmetric listening room), and imperfections in your hearing (likely significant).  If all of these factors were truly identical, then switching channels would create a perfect mirror image of the resulting sound.  If you could visualize the sound waves as lasers, you could take a picture looking down for one setup and then looking up for the reverse setup and the two pictures would be identical.

As you noted, hearing a familiar recording backwards is a significant change and the more "stereo" the recording is the harder I think it would be to make any meaningful comparisons.  I have a particular recording that has a guitar so much in the left channel that I've actually disconnected that side just to see if it was heard at all on the right channel (as expected it was).  I happened to catch a local dealer with an interconnect connected backwards on one end with this song.  They seemed confused that I was so adamant but did discover the L/R reversal upon inspection.

Just think it thru fellas if L is wired to R and vise versa there wouldn't be anything in the middle. Everything is switched so why would there be center fill. For example  someone walking across the stage from l to r would appear to start in the center right walk off stagt to the right and then reappear left of center seemingly walking toward the middle again. 

@mihorn

While the diagram you provide is true, I don’t know of any theory of speaker dispersion that matches your description.

I suggest you take a look at ANY midrange or woofer spec sheet and examine the of-center frequency response, as well as any of the lateral dispersion charts from Stereophile.

In all these cases the overwhelming issue is the diameter of the cone relative to the wavelength, and the shape of the driver, be it cone, dome, or even flat doesn’t play a big role.