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Re: That old devil "Wood Effect"

Hi Andy,

Actually, it doesn't matter a bit if "not all recording engineers take as much care as Stan does." Heaven knows, I admire Ricker's work, but once the CD or LP is out of his mastering shop, the polarity is out of his hands, too.

The fact is, polarity can be--and usually is--reversed many times along the way from the recording to your listening position. For example, it is typically reversed at least a couple of times in most power amps alone. Whether it comes out the same way it went in depends on the number of stages an amp has, and whether they are inverting or non-inverting.

And that's just amps. Throw in CD players, DACs, preamps, and whatnot--not to mention all the steps between the master and the finished CD--and basically you have a crap shoot as to whether polarity is preserved.

But all that is moot, anyway, because recordings come both ways. They always have. I suspect they always will.

That means, there is no "correct" polarity for a system, there is only the correct polarity for this given recording.

You cannot set up your system to be correct for all recordings. If you leave your system set for one polarity, it will be right for some recordings, wrong for others. That's why you need to be able to switch it.

BTW, I understood perfectly what Ricker was saying. I was just responding specifically to the post.



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