Röhren und Hören

The only change came when Cabasse America's Dale Fontenot paid a visit. He was gratified to find that I'd done a reasonably good, if not perfect, job of placing and blending the system, but suggested reversing the polarity of the entire system by flipping the Baltic IIs' speaker-cable leads and sliding the Thor II subwoofers' phase switches to 180°. That made what I'd thought was a very fine-sounding system into an exceptionally fine-sounding one, with improved spaciousness.

2285b hat geschrieben:Moin,

...Dynamik und Ortbarkeit haben bei mir kräftig zulegt, ....

Grüße
Axel

SH [Steve Hoffman] points out a problem with multi-tracked and multi-miked recordings, which is that some things might get better and some things might get worse, so how does one know which is right?


The answer is one I owe to my good friend Robert Pincus, who for close to fifteen years has been playgrading and helping me evaluate recordings as part of my record business (Better Records.) He discovered that virtually every copy of RCA LSO 6006 "Belafonte at Carnagie Hall" is in reverse absolute phase. I would guess that 90+% of all audiophiles playing the record don't know that, but they could certainly learn a thing or two by reversing their speaker leads next time they play it, because the difference is quite extraordinary.


The album -- which every record collecting audiophile on the planet can easily obtain a copy of, as they are common as dirt -- starts out with loud applause, a brass fanfare, a drum roll, and then Belafonte starts to sing. When you play the record back on an acoustically polarized system, meaning correct polarity, the applause is a little thin and bright, the brass is a bit thin and bright and fairly forward, and when Belafonte starts to sing he's a bit oversize, and the orchestra does not sound nearly as far behind him as the picture on the album jacket would lead you to believe.


Well, there's no reason that the album shouldn't actually sound that way. It may simply be the result of how it was miked, mixed, mastered and pressed. And people seem to love it this way, as it has been on the TAS Superdisc List for as long as I can remember (probably from the very beginning), with no mention of polarity problems that I can recall. Practically every stereo store in the world has one on hand for demonstration purposes, so how wrong can it be?


Maybe not wrong, more like "less right". When you reverse polarity, a number of extraordinary changes take place. The applause now sounds less like a recording of applause -- we used to say poor reproduction of applause has the sound of sizzling bacon in a frying pan -- and more like lots of people clapping their hands. The brass instruments become much more full bodied, while still maintaining their leading edges, the "bite" so to speak. And most amazing of all, when Belafonte steps up to the mike, his head is now human sized. His voice sounds smoother and fuller, with less annoying zip at the top. And the orchestra is twenty feet behind him, just like the picture.


That's the first minute or so of the record. Everything from that point on is better too of course, but you only have to do the test for one minute to know whether you are in or out, and there's no mistaking which is which. If the album gets worse when you switch the polarity, you were reversed to begin with. Correct the problem and play some records with massed strings or close-miked brass; you'll realize that the glare and distortion and brightness -- the kind of sound that SH hates more than anything -- was a playback problem, not a software problem.