Polarity of speaker drivers

Some speaker companies (like Vandersteen and the old Thiel) stake their design philosophy on the premise that these time domain issues are crucial.  Listen to those designs yourself and see what you think.  I'm a Vandersteen guy, so you know where I stand.

Full range headphones, using a single driver without a crossover for all frequencies, can tell us what a loudspeaker should sound like, at least in amplitude and temporal terms. So do some planar speakers, such as the Eminent Technology LFT-8b, which has a single driver reproducing 180Hz to 10kHz, without a crossover in that range. The x/o at 180Hz to a dynamic woofer, and at 10kHz to a ribbon tweeter, are both 1st order-6dB/octave, just as in Vandersteen designs.

@sbank is right.

However, that not every speaker maker has adopted time and phase matched designs should tell you something about how important it seems. If time coherence was that revolutionary no one would be able to sell any other kind of speaker.  However this is not the case.

Make up your own mind, of course and buy what you will enjoy.

I think maybe it's a mistake to learn to tell speaker polarity by ear. :) I mean, let's say you can learn this through experimentation and feedback. You go from 2016 when you can't tell speaker polarity, to sometime in 2017 when you can. Doesn't that just make your comfortable music world more limited?

Best,


Erik

Forgot to mention, you can experiment with full-range drivers, those that have no crossover, relatively cheaply. Madisound is selling a complete kit on sale. Some people get a couple of hits of that and never look back to multi-way speakers again.

glai, your basic assumption of why switching a drivers polarity is correct.
It has everything to do with phasing.... There is no speaker with a crossover that is completely phase coherent.... period. Even the most "Phase Coherent" speakers have phasing issues.
We normally talk about crossovers typically in Electrical slopes... we may call it 6db per octave or 12db per octave, but when you add the natural rolloff of a driver along with phasing, in the end a 6db slope may be 9 or 10 db per octave.... I often might use a 18db per octave electrical slope on a tweeter and a 12db per octave slope on a woofer...On my last pair pair of speakers,  the end result was a 24db per octave roll off and the crossover point being 6db down. This combination rolls phasing around to come back in alignment and in fact, quite often in closer alignment than using what most consider the only truly phase coherent 6db slopes. When you listen to a pair of speakers and the polarity is crossed on a speaker,  most folks do not say that the speakers polarity is wrong,  they say "The Speaker is out of Phase".... When you switch the polarity, phasing comes back in alignment.
Under Electrical crossover conditions, when you cross a tweeter and midrange at 12db per octave slopes, they are 180 degrees out of phase, the idea of switching the polarity of 1 driver is an attempt to improve phasing or bring the drivers back in phase with each other. Anytime the polarity is switched on a driver,  this should be the reasoning behind it. 
This is a very elementary explanation. I hope that it helps.  Tim