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Get over it, the sad truth is....

... CD's, vinyl, or any other format has no certainty about what the absolute polarity will be. One format can vary from the other, despite the product coming from the same company. Even more frustrating, is that re-issues or new batches of product could have a DIFFERENT absolute polarity than an earlier one, or a later one.

The reason for this is that so many engineers are not fully aware of the issues with absolute polarity, it was never 'taught' in engineering school, and the recording industry pro's typically didn't talk about it to junior engineers. etc. It sort of fell through the cracks for a generation or two of recording pro's. Oh, lot's of recording pro's know about absolute polarity, and take steps to preserve it, but unfortunately, not all the rest of the folks who build mastering devices, recorders, playback devices, etc., are up to speed, or even care.

That last comes from a portion of the hard-core objectivists, some of whom firmly believe that absolute polarity just doesn't matter. Of course, when your'e listening on some high-order slope 3-way speaker's that were selected because they measure 'perfect' in frequency response, and the effective absolute polarity changes three or four times over the audio band, and your power amp has poor audio waveform envelope rentention (even though it has wonderful static sine wave THD readings), and the signal source has a terminal case of digititis, even though it measures to better than 16 bits of linearity, well, gee, absolute polarity is hard as hell to hear even if you wanted to.

Yes, some of the audiophile labels take great care in maintaining the absolute polarity of their products, and can be counted on to be consistent, but the vast majority of labels just don't keep track of it, or even know to keep track. So worrying about it overly is not going to do much good, the best you can do is to have a polarity switch somewhere in your system (the ideal place is in the CDP/DAC, as it is theoretically possible for a polarity inversion to be performed with no additional sonic degradation, without adding any analog switches into the signal path), and just listen to the music both ways, and pick the polarity you prefer.


Jon Risch

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