SACD... can you hear the difference?

Ghost, sorry for delay. YES - you can reverse your absolute phase - by changing the connections of your speaker cables--"either" at the amp or speaker end.(not both because you'd end up with the same as you started). i.e connect the red to the black and black to the red; a very simple switch. NOTE!! I always turned my amp off before doing this to eliminate the chance of accidentally touching the red and black-AND POSSIBLY 'SHORTING YOUR AMP WITH RUINOUS CONSEQUENCES!! Remember to turn amp off please! Try it with some music you really like. The clarity and dynamics really are obvious when you have matched your reproduction phase to that of the recording phase. I've enjoyed this for 35+ years and my ears know if the phase is not right. The music is dulled and slower than if its right. I think the book "The Wood Effect" is about this but I'm not sure as I've never read it. (Of course if there are other inaccuracies within your playback system the difference "may" not show. For example if your plug polarity is incorrect). I'll be happy to help you tune up your system by mailing ptss at shaw dot ca with reference to this.

Ptss - thanks for the reply. Glad I saw it. I'm good on making the switch without shorting things out. Understand very well your advice. Auditioning a CJ Premier that DOES invert phase and have reversed R&L inputs at each speaker. As an experiment, I need to go back and see what things sound like without the channels reversed.

Remember to just play one CD in comparing your sound. Perhaps note what what phase that CD is for future reference.

Hello again - the XLO test & burn in CD has a couple of tracks for testing "phase-correctness". They have multiple versions of the same excerpt of "Stormy Weather" that are done mono, stereo out of phase, stereo out of absolute phase and the full song correct absolute phase.

To my ear, differences between the out of absolute phase and correct phase recordings are difficult to detect...I THINK the out of absolute phase sounds a little less focused but am not sure I could pick it out with my eyes closed. Just to be clear - no such difficulty detecting the out of phase recording...it's diffuse and uncentered.

Regarding absolute phase/polarity, for further discussion see this current thread. I would emphasize two things:

1)When the setting of the phase switch on a preamp is changed, not only is the polarity of the recording being inverted, but the preamp's circuit configuration is being changed. Which in turn may affect the preamp's sonics to some degree, depending on the specific design. In some cases, involving components having unbalanced internal signal paths, an active stage might even be inserted or removed from the signal path when the setting of that switch is changed.

I suspect that point is not applicable to most or all DACs that provide a phase switch, however, such as the Berkeley which was mentioned above. In those cases the inversion may be performed in the digital domain, without any circuit changes that are in the signal path.

2)Polarity differences are most likely to be perceivable on recordings that have been recorded with a minimal number of microphones (e.g., two or three), and that have been subjected to minimal electronic processing during mastering. Most recordings in most genres do not meet those criteria.

Regards,
-- Al