P Floding Wrote: > I'm polarity switching my sound (via remote) as I type this, and there > is no question in my mind that the change is very audible (in my > system). >
Hi P Floding, I'm going to try to explain why there is such skepticism about this. Perhaps what I'm saying here is obvious to you - if so I'm sorry - but it's become clear to me in this discussion that there's a basic lack of communication here, so maybe this will help. From your point of view it must be annoying to be faced with such skepticism all the time, so perhaps this will explain it a bit? I think for most people with much experience with wave mechanics or AC circuits or anything else related to harmonic oscillators, the idea that a polarity switch could be audible in music is quite hard to understand. While it's clear that under certain highly artificial circumstances it could be audible, in music my intuition at least is that the effect must be very small. That intuition is not coming from nothing - it's based on many years of professional experience (not with audio per se, but with physics). When the claim of audibility is coupled to the claim that one sounds _better_ than the other rather than simply very slightly different, the level of skepticism rises even higher, particularly if it is also claimed that the improvement is due to one being somehow closer to the original sound being recorded. I won't go through all the many reasons for this again (they appear in previous posts in this thread), but simply say that this sounds, to me, unlikely nearly to the point of impossibility. On the other hand, there is a powerful, well-studied psycho-acoustic effect which could be responsible for this perception of improvement. It works like this - you are expecting, or anticipating, hearing a difference. Music is a very complicated thing, and your memory of it is never perfect. As such, you hear things the second time around which don't quite match your memory of the first. Each such instance is taken as evidence for a difference. At this point there is a kind of feedback effect - you are now starting to think there is a difference, even if you weren't before, and so-called "confirmation bias" - that people remember facts and events which confirm their prior beliefs more than those which dis-confirm them - helps to reinforce this. In fact this effect or something close to it has been demonstrated to be responsible for perceived differences at least twice recently on this forum (that is, people were sure they could hear differences and then failed to do so in blind tests, which are the only way I know to disentangle this). So, faced with a phenomenon (your perception of a difference) with two possible explanations, one that seems rather unlikely versus one which is known to be present and important, it's pretty natural that many people go for the second option. If I were you, I would be quite curious to discover the source of the difference heard when switching polarity. I would be skeptical the origin was physical rather than psychological, because I know only too well that I at least am susceptible to such things, but I wouldn't rule anything out. So, first I would have someone switch it back and forth randomly and see if I could in fact hear a difference blind. If so, it would at least make it clear that there was a real acoustic difference when the setting is changed, and then the investigation could proceed from there. -- opaqueice ------------------------------------------------------------------------ opaqueice's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=4234 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=22118 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
