Reversing absolute phase

The nice thing about this tweek is that it costs nothing, and will keep you occupied for several hours!

Thanks Tvad!!

You're welcome.

This comes up about once a month. Since there is not and never was an industry "standard" for absolute phase, LPs and even CDs are not consistently created equal with respect to phase. In fact, on an LP, one track can be out of phase (or phase inverted) with respect to the next track. Therefore, if you want phase to be "right" for each and every piece of software, you are going to be jumping up and down a lot swapping the hot and ground connections of your speaker wires, even assuming you can hear the difference. IOW, if your preamp is inverting, it will still be correct about 50% of the time. And if you are obsessed with "proper" phasing, you had best acquire a preamp with a built-in phase switch. Just be sure your L channel is never 180 degrees out of phase (not "polarity") with your R channel. That DOES sound bad.

Just because recording engineers are too lazy to bother with absolute polarity does not mean that having it does not sound better. You are correct that in many multi-miked recordings, some mikes may be out of polarity and others not. I would suggest that the industry should establish a standard.

I don't think I have ever stumbled onto an out of phase recording. I have heard instances where people were not careful and hooked up the cables wrong.