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Originally Posted by clarkjohnsen  What needs to be pointed out, if not spelled out, is that the device does indeed work. |
When used as instructed, it works as intended. Most of the time.
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I have used it, as have others. Have you?
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Yes, I have worked with a handheld polarity tester. I assumed my writing about it would imply that.
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because when you write "complex/arbitrary signal" you pick the worst case
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The issue is not that I'm presenting a worst case (I am not), the trouble is that polarity testers are expecting a best case. The tester is designed to test speaker / driver polarity using a specified test signal, it's not designed to test polarity of a complex signal, playing through a speaker.
In my experience, a polarity tester is very easily confused,
even when using the specified test signal. I'm confident that anyone regularly
working with those testers will have made the same experience at some point. Feeding it with a much more complex signal, i.e. music (recorded in a room, played back through a speaker array in another room), and expecting to get a reliable results seems very optimistic, to put it mildly.