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Balderdash

Posted by phenderson on October 30, 2000 at 16:20:43

In Reply to: Re: There is no way to test... posted by ws on October 30, 2000 at 09:07:40:

Assume a speaker with one full-range driver reproducing the sound of a vibrating membrane, say a tympani (a "tympanum"?), heard by a microphone and amplified. Absolute phase means the speaker diaphragm moves toward you first if and only if the diaphragm in the recording microphone moved backward (away from the tympani)first; otherwise it moves away from you first. It is possible to invert phase simply by reversing the relationship between the speaker diaphragm and the crests and troughs in the electrical signal, which can be done by reversing the leads. (If bi-amping or bi-wiring, don't forget to reverse both pairs!) Similarly, the recording itself can reverse phase, and it can muddle the phase relationships between the different instruments or groups recorded separately. With all the elaborate editing that goes on in studios it is questionable if one can identify "phase-correct" recordings without knowing the engineers. Most speaker do not have the drivers perfectly in phase (getting them more-or-less in phase was Jon Bau's great achievement at Spica!) Some even intentionally invert phase from the tweeter because it sounds better in a big room. AR did this decades ago with their classic AR3a, and recently Vienna Acoustics claims this is why Stereophile found the woofer and tweeter wired out-of-phase in their review of the Mozart (at first, JA seemed to think it had been a factory error.)

Now as to the setup mentioned: Don't assume that various components are non-inverting -- perhaps you have asked knowledgeable people already. If one component inverts phase then you should re-invert phase somewhere else since the net result would be correct phase (again, this assumes the recording is in correct phase to begin with.) I am surprised that the C-J ART is inverting, since the instruction book for my older C-J MV-50 brags that the component does NOT invert phase and instructs owners to be sure their system as a whole is in phase. None of this should be confused with matching phase for the two channels, which, if not accomplished, will produce very noticeable deleterious effects as many test CDs demonstrate. I.e. if one channel is not correct absolute phase, the other one should also be incorrect(!)

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