[bob katz]

Originally Posted by Lagerfeldt

Playing around with polarity on some asymmetrical waveforms made me think about absolute polarity in mastering.

I was trying to explain the phenomenon to a student and failed miserably in explaining how to detect it (I can explain why), except that 1) it can only be determined by ear, and 2) you need to confirm that it's not a monitoring issue first.

How often do you guys check and switch for the best polarity setting in mastering? I use the word "best" intentionally, since it's not always a case of simply being "different".

On some tracks it makes almost no difference, while it can make a huge difference on other tracks, e.g. a dance track with a saw bass or whatever.

I should bother more often but I keep forgetting! It is the last thing that I bother with. My celebrated Lipinski speakers are incorrect absolute polarity! It's a deep dark secret, I haven't even told Andrew as his English is rather poor. Anyway, they aren't going to re-engineer all their speakers. So they're incompatible with everyone else's, especially everyone else's subwoofer, or at least remember to correct the polarity.

Once I discovered the Lipinski polarity was incorrect, I reversed all the speaker leads.

Now, can you hear it? Lagerfeldt is absolutely right. Sometimes it matters a lot. But it is not my highest priority to fix absolute polarity in mastering, it's even less important to me than dither :-). I save that consideration for my audiophile clients.

BK