How important is it for you to attain a holographic image?

geoffkait - I’ve purchased about 18 Mercury Living Presence pop LPs from Stan Ricker in the 1990s, the engineer of them and of Mobile Fidelity LPs. He told me that many of them had parts of the recording out of phase while other parts were in phase. They were not consistent as to being in or out of phase and changed phase positions within a track and between tracks. I don’t know if this afflicted the classical Mercury LPs but I don’t think so. The pop LPs definitely have some odd soundstage sounds with parts out of phase.

I have two copies of Brasil 66’ Stillness with A&M brown labels, different stampers. One is 100% out of phase. Very nice sounding AFTER reversing phase at the speaker or amp. The other is in phase and sounds the best of all pressings, really excellent. Tom Port of Better Records told me about 20 years ago that I should listen to each and see which one is obviously better and definitely listen to them in phase.

Out of phase recordings are generally not good sounding from my experience. Partially out of phase recordings can be okay like Stan Ricker’s pop Mercurys.

Everything is relative. Obviously, whether a record or CD is in correct overall Polarity - which is what I’m referring to - depends on the mastering engineer, who cannot change whatever damage was produced by the recording engineer in terms of Polarity, or phase as you call it, which are the issues you referred to. There is no standard for Polarity or even Absolute Polarity. The best strategy for coping with the ubiquitous OOP records and CDs might be to ensure your system is in Reverse Absolute Polarity.

Piano, it's interesting that you should mention Telefunken.  Recently, I replaced some 6922's in a phono-pre with Telefunken, and they kicked it up a big notch.

I had been using NOS Mullards on the CJ, and I was satisfied, but I might be more satisfied with the Telefunken.

Thanks for the tip.

Ironically , I was using Mullards too.  Telefunkens made a big improvement.

Most Mullard's sold are fake .