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[soongsc]

I have not upgraded to V19, but I am desperate for the capability to simply and quickly switch the polarity of all outputs from a phone or tablet like you can adjust volume, from the iPhone and iPad to be specific.  I think you would be doing the community of serious audio listening a real favor and service by implementing this capability.

Not to confuse this with the polarity setting already implemented which is used to compensate for electronics polarity, the capability to switch polarity is to compensate for the music played.

Really love all the other capability, but this is one that is really critical for full enjoyment of good recording.  My current list of music polarity 117 brands indicates about a 50% split on polarity.  This makes the polarity switching very critical for music playback.

[Arindelle]

My current list of music polarity 117 brands indicates about a 50% split on polarity.  This makes the polarity switching very critical for music playback.

sorry not following brands of what? telephones and tablets, or rippers or the optical drives themselves, or studio masters that reverse the polarity?

Assuming the former, could you link your findings? I find this sort of strange, but sounds interesting.

Like of 117 brands 60 of them reverse the polarity.  7 or 8 brands must have 95+% market share. So if ipads reverse the polarity shouldn't that be in an iphone app ... not sure why Apple, Samsung, Nokia, Google, Blackberry would do this.

I also don't get what you mean by a difference between music polarity and electronic polarity. If you are streaming to your phone or tablet, you can set up zones call it tablet 1 and switch the polarity in DSP settings. You just switch to that zone and thats it. Maybe you couldn't do that in 18 don't remember when zones were implemented.

or are you talking ripping programs and optical drives? like in this article http://www.hydrogenaud.io/forums/index.php?showtopic=9565&mode=linear or are you talking about phase

[Matt]

Polarity switching is there.  Look at DSP Studio > Parametric Equalizer > Reverse polarity

You can leave it in the list and quickly check or uncheck it depending on what you play.  Or you can save a DSP Preset each way and set the tags of the files to load the right preset.

[mwillems]

FWIW, I've had several amplifiers that flipped absolute polarity, which can be an enormous pain when designing active crossovers and trying to get the delay right, until you realize that one of your amps is flipping polarity and the other isn't 

To second what Matt said, the DSP studio polarity switch works great to deal with those kinds of issues.

[soongsc]

There are a few issues with trying to change polarity through the DSP setting:

1. Since each music can have a different polarity, although a specific album is most likely to have the same polarity, it is still very inconvenient when you have to go through the DSP route and change the polarity if you come across one than needs a different polarity.

2. There is no way to do it through an iPad for example.  This mean one has to walk over to the playback computer to make the change.

The polarity difference is in the released albums.  Most of the older brands like RCA, DECCA have reverse polarity while brands like Reference Recording, Sheffield Lab have the normal polarity.

This was brought to my attention around 6 years ago when a friend send me an article from a Hong Kong magazine of nearly 10 years ago, I kept a screen copy of the sorted results of from it which can be found here
http://imageshack.us/a/img183/5360/recordingpolaritygb6.jpg
Since the results seem to be compatible with my listening impressions, I have continued to add to the list because my setup can distinguish the differences quite obviously.  I am sure others have systems will good performance as well.

[soongsc]

Polarity switching is there.  Look at DSP Studio > Parametric Equalizer > Reverse polarity

You can leave it in the list and quickly check or uncheck it depending on what you play.  Or you can save a DSP Preset each way and set the tags of the files to load the right preset.

Can this be done from an iPad? I did not see such feature, but maybe I am not guru enough using this.

[Arindelle]

There are a few issues with trying to change polarity through the DSP setting:

1. Since each music can have a different polarity, although a specific album is most likely to have the same polarity, it is still very inconvenient when you have to go through the DSP route and change the polarity if you come across one than needs a different polarity.

2. There is no way to do it through an iPad for example.  This mean one has to walk over to the playback computer to make the change.

I'm not going to touch your number 1 but as for your number 2 - there is indeed away to do this from an ipad .. you will need version 19 and JRemote to do so though. You will set up two zones lile ipadPolarity+ and Ipad-, setting the polarity in the Parametric equalizer setting. In JRemote on your ipad choose to play through the zone or in this case the "polarity" of your choice. Also, to pull to an ipad in version 20 of JR as mentioned you can associate DSPs with tracks

The polarity difference is in the released albums.  Most of the older brands like RCA, DECCA have reverse polarity while brands like Reference Recording, Sheffield Lab have the normal polarity.

This was brought to my attention around 6 years ago when a friend send me an article from a Hong Kong magazine of nearly 10 years ago

well I'm not going to discuss the SQ -- if you hear the difference, then go for it. Strange that Telarc or Decca would change the polarity if their engineers didn't think it sounded better or didn't think it made a difference.

[6233638]

Since you can now assign DSP Presets to certain tracks, couldn't this be a "set and forget" thing, rather than requiring control from the iPad?

[Arindelle]

Since you can now assign DSP Presets to certain tracks, couldn't this be a "set and forget" thing, rather than requiring control from the iPad?

yes, sure. And you'd have to to stream to the ipad. But to control from the ipad you'd have a choice.

If the OP has 200K+ tracks could be a lot of tagging

[mwillems]

Strange that Telarc or Decca would change the polarity if their engineers didn't think it sounded better or didn't think it made a difference.

There's a couple of issues in play;

1) It could be accidental- Some folks think absolute polarity is audible, but I'm not aware of any abx tests showing that it's audible. I make no judgment or comment personally as to whether it is actually audible or not, but the consensus of the audio science books I've read is that it's not audible.  So it's possible that some studios (especially early recording studios) didn't notice or care about the absolute polarity of their recordings because it's supposed to be inaudible.

Similarly, I've had audio equipment (several amps, a few other items in the audio chain) that inverted polarity and didn't tell you that's what they were doing.  Some of these were explicitly marketed as "Pro Audio" devices.  Again, because polarity is supposed to be inaudible, manufacturers don't necessarily care if their equipment inverts.  I only ever noticed because I was bi-amping and one amp inverted and the other didn't, which was audible because it screwed up my delay (relative polarity is definitely, proveably audible).  But whole system polarity (absolute polarity) is supposed to be inaudible, so manufacturers may not be paying attention or advertising the fact that their equipment inverts, which could lead to accidentally inverted output.

2) It could be deliberate- The other issue is that it's very hard to determine what the "original" polarity of a recording even was; one popular method is to assess the polarity of drum hits (does the hit create a positive or negative pressure wave at the moment of impact).  The issue is that a recorded drum hit will have an opposite polarity depending on where it was miced from; if you mic the drum from on top of the drum, you'll get the opposite polarity than if you miced the drum from inside the drum.  Micing from inside the drum is a common studio trick, deliberately reversing polarity of the drum hits as compared to the rest of the music, that is to say micing part of the mix in one polarity and micing the drums with the opposite polarity for effect, because relative polarity within a mix (as opposed to the absolute polarity of the whole mix) is definitely audible  http://www.prosoundweb.com/article/print/not_so_mysterious_using_polarity_as_another_tool_for_optimizing_drum_sound .  As a result depending on the methodology used to develop that "reversed polarity" list, the perceived "reversed polarity" may actually be deliberate.

[kstuart]

The list in the link implies that certain record labels are different from each other, which then implies that they are the same for all releases within the labels.

The problem with that concept is that equipment hookup varies by recording studio and by recording engineer.  Those are contracted by record producers, not by labels.

(I say this having hooked up gear in professional recording studios for projects.)

[Arindelle]

really interesting McWilliams; Thanks

So take Decca which still makes recordings; lets say the engineer made a deliberate parity reversal. Then you should not want to reverse it, if you wanted to hear how it was supposed to be listened to.

Or if there was a basis (or even a risk) of parity reversal affecting music quality, I'd think that some of these big classical companies, recording studios, producers would have already switched their equipment. Lets say they did, but as KStuart brings up can't just say that all Archiv recordings after 1992 are reversed or vice-versa

Or the engineers and musicians/producers/recording studios that approve the masters either are convinced that their is no audible difference, and like their master. Then shifting the parity would be like putting the loudness on or boosting the eq, a subjective choice on the listeners end. Why not. JRiver can do that. But then wouldn't it be no longer bit perfect playback, sensu stricto?

[mwillems]

really interesting McWilliams; Thanks

So take Decca which still makes recordings; lets say the engineer made a deliberate parity reversal. Then you should not want to reverse it, if you wanted to hear how it was supposed to be listened to.

Or if there was a basis (or even a risk) of parity reversal affecting music quality, I'd think that some of these big classical companies, recording studios, producers would have already switched their equipment. Lets say they did, but as KStuart brings up can't just say that all Archiv recordings after 1992 are reversed or vice-versa

Or the engineers and musicians/producers/recording studios that approve the masters either are convinced that their is no audible difference, and like their master. Then shifting the parity would be like putting the loudness on or boosting the eq, a subjective choice on the listeners end. Why not. JRiver can do that. But then wouldn't it be no longer bit perfect playback, sensu stricto?

My point was that it's unclear how anyone is successfully testing to see if a recording has it's "polarity reversed" at step one.  Because it's very hard (or impossible depending on your view) to tell if the polarity of a recording is reversed or not, people look at a number of factors to assess the "polarity" of the recording.  The most popular way is to look at whether a drum hit creates a positive or a negative pressure wave.  If the drums were deliberately recorded with their polarity opposite the rest of the music and you only look at the drum hits to determine polarity, you could come to the conclusion that the polarity of the recording as a whole was reversed when in fact only the drum hits were recorded with reversed polarity.

If you then flip the polarity switch on that recording, what's the effect?  The drums become positive and the rest of the recording becomes negative, but their relative polarity remains the same (they're still 180 degrees apart).  That means that it shouldn't sound any different unless you believe that absolute polarity of the whole mix makes a difference.  If you believe that absolute polarity makes a difference, then you've goofed it up and flipped the whole thing because you were only looking at the trunk of the elephant and concluded it was a snake.

I can't hear the difference when the absolute polarity of the entire mix is flipped, and I'm not aware of any studies suggesting it's audible.  But if it is audible, then you'd need to have a good methodology for determining whether polarity is correct or flipped on a recording by recording basis.

And kstuart is 100% right, polarity of a studio's output will vary for a lot of reasons (some resulting from equipment, some resulting form personnel).  It's a little like wiring a power socket;  the right prong is supposed to be hot, and the left prong is supposed to be neutral.  Only about 60% of the installed power sockets I've tested were wired that way.  But IME most equipment* doesn't really care which is which as long as it has one of each.  Recordings can have "correct" or "inverted" absolute polarity, in part because for the most part we can't tell which is which (we can, for the most part, only hear differences in relative polarity within the mix).

*Some equipment cares, and cares a lot, and a reversed polarity socket can pose a serious safety hazard, I just mean that most equipment will turn on and function normally, not that it's a good idea.

[soongsc]

I am going to try setting this up, if I need to get the zones setup using V19, them that means I need to upgrade.

Recording polarity, it was first brought to my attention when I was doing loudspeaker measurements.  I always wondered why the phase was wrong, then I discovered the mic and mic amp combination gave negative output upon positive sound pressure.

Then I asked around a mic builders forum to see if what the normal verification procedure is, seemed that most did not take polarity into consideration.

In the early days, inverting amps were commonly used as a means to reduce distortion, it seemed that preserving I the polarity was not considered important to maintain.

Later I did some testing, and did indeed show that it was audible if certain systems performance are met.  These performances are not normally published.  I demonstrated it to another audio systems designer, and he was amazed about the difference.

Basically, I think the option to conveniently switch polarity is a good tool to let people decide for themselves whether they hear or care about the difference.  Sometimes I care, especially during critical listening sessions, mostly I can catch it in the first 30 seconds of listening.  Sometimes I don't care when it is background music.

I do not think anyone deliberately wanted one polarity in the recording or the other, it was just by chance depending on the equipment used.  When multi mic recordings are used, it could be possible that you have a mixture of either polarity in the end.  And there are always some exceptions in any brand.

[soongsc]

Since you can now assign DSP Presets to certain tracks, couldn't this be a "set and forget" thing, rather than requiring control from the iPad?

I would hate to go through 13000+ tracks to do it.  It is much easier to make the switch when you feel it does not sound right.  Many small brand need to be listened to first, when you start doing that for every new CD you rip, you really don't have time to enjoy the performance.

[ogs]

Polarity switching is there.  Look at DSP Studio > Parametric Equalizer > Reverse polarity

You can leave it in the list and quickly check or uncheck it depending on what you play.  Or you can save a DSP Preset each way and set the tags of the files to load the right preset.

The Zones feature is quite elegant and may solve this if you have complete control of tagging (and the time to do it). It would be better to have an invert button available on the remote in addition to Zones. This would make it easy to find which polarity to use for Zone tagging. The remote of my Devialet has an invert button. I use it all the time - and to those who say they can not hear polarity inversion, you need speakers with a proper impulse/step response to hear this easily.  The speakers need to be designed this way or you'll have to use (room)correction to fix the time response.

[soongsc]

In V18 I could setup two different zones, but the effect is weird.

1. Each zone seems to manage its own playback, so I cannot just switch polarity of music that is playing and expect polarity change.  I need to stop whatever is playing, switch the zone, the select what I want to play.

2. It is possible to have two zones playing through the same outputs, thus mixing the music.

This arrangement is not ideal.  Does it work the same way in the newer versions?  In briefly looked at V19 new features where it allows you to copy settings from a different zone.  Seems to me the basic operation is the same, not a good way for polarity switching.

[Arindelle]

In V18 I could setup two different zones, but the effect is weird.

1. Each zone seems to manage its own playback, so I cannot just switch polarity of music that is playing and expect polarity change.  I need to stop whatever is playing, switch the zone, the select what I want to play.

or you load the same music to both zones, then switch.

2. It is possible to have two zones playing through the same outputs, thus mixing the music.

do not understand. If using the same output why would you want to play both at the same time anyway? you would stop one. Then play the other. You could use different outputs ?

This arrangement is not ideal.  Does it work the same way in the newer versions?  In briefly looked at V19 new features where it allows you to copy settings from a different zone.  Seems to me the basic operation is the same, not a good way for polarity switching.

sorry this merits the you've-got-to-be-kidding gif 

[ogs]

In V18 I could setup two different zones, but the effect is weird.

1. Each zone seems to manage its own playback, so I cannot just switch polarity of music that is playing and expect polarity change.  I need to stop whatever is playing, switch the zone, the select what I want to play.

2. It is possible to have two zones playing through the same outputs, thus mixing the music.

This arrangement is not ideal.  Does it work the same way in the newer versions?  In briefly looked at V19 new features where it allows you to copy settings from a different zone.  Seems to me the basic operation is the same, not a good way for polarity switching.

I believe v19 and above does what you want here. There is an option to stop playback in a zone when you switch to another where the output device is the same. I've tested polarity switch on tracks within an album.

[Arindelle]

I believe v19 and above does what you want here. There is an option to stop playback in a zone when you switch to another where the output device is the same. I've tested polarity switch on tracks within an album.

yes, in Zoneswitch. Provided that a conditional rule is set up, if memory serves. Not sure how that would work without prior tagging. Maybe an expression? Not really an option though is it? 

[soongsc]

I believe v19 and above does what you want here. There is an option to stop playback in a zone when you switch to another where the output device is the same. I've tested polarity switch on tracks within an album.

The V18 works like that, but it is inconvenient to stop the current music, then go through the albums and play that album.  More intuitively, it should work just like flipping the polarity switch, and whatever is playing will continue to play in the new polarity.

[soongsc]

I found something weird.  Before I setup a second zone, when I click on the "now playing" vew, I see all the album tracks and all the tracks in the album gets played.  After I setup the second zone, the "now playing" view only shows one track and only one track gets played; if I go to the "album view" and shuffle, then all the tracks are shuffled and displayed in the "now playing" view, and most of the time all tracks are played.

Can't figure out why it is doing this.  Does anyone know?

[Matt]

This would be a good use of DSP presets in v20.

[soongsc]

This would be a good use of DSP presets in v20.

Why?  Was it a bug in v18?  Setting up a second zone effects the existing zone? ?

[Arindelle]

I found something weird.  Before I setup a second zone, when I click on the "now playing" vew, I see all the album tracks and all the tracks in the album gets played.  After I setup the second zone, the "now playing" view only shows one track and only one track gets played; if I go to the "album view" and shuffle, then all the tracks are shuffled and displayed in the "now playing" view, and most of the time all tracks are played.

Can't figure out why it is doing this.  Does anyone know?

I don't remember if you have these features or not, 18 is no longer on my PC. But you have to send what you're playing to the new zone (right click Send to? ) or toggle to the second zone before selecting. Also, you have to switch zones to listen to it (or set up a rule to switch automatically which would require tagging). You can also go to Playing Now Overview or use CTRL+T to toggle zones, but the "Send to" command regroups all playing commands to the zone of your choice. Can't be sure if this addresses your probleme but it sounds like it to me.

If you are asking how to do this in 20, ok. But this might be better off to post in the Version 18 forum. People would still have that program installed there. Or try version 20 for 30days before paying for it to see if it suits. You get an upgrade price too, you know.

[mojave]

Why?  Was it a bug in v18?  Setting up a second zone effects the existing zone? ?

DSP Presets is a new feature in MC20. There is a new tag called DSP. In the DSP Studio there is now a Load/Save DSP button. This lets you switch polarity, for example, and then save as a DSP Preset. You could call it "Reverse Polarity." For all the songs that you want to switch polarity, you just click the DSP tag and select "Reverse Polarity." Now the polarity will switch on a song by song basis in a single playlist.

The current limitation is that the DSP stays switched until another song's DSP tag switches it to something else. This means you need both an Original Polarity and a Reverse Polarity DSP and all files need to be tagged.

The Zone method requires a separate playlist for each zone.

[bblue]

The current limitation is that the DSP stays switched until another song's DSP tag switches it to something else. This means you need both an Original Polarity and a Reverse Polarity DSP and all files need to be tagged.

I don't understand the logic for this.  WHY would you want a DSP action to stay on from the first point it is activated?  To be a proper action for a given track it should turn on at the beginning of a track and turn off at the end.  Is this in effect trying to cover up some lack of speed or performance of the DSP on/off action?

The Tool AUTOEQ, though it had problems, didn't do this silly kind of stuff.  But it did suffer from slowness to activate and deactivate and was limited to one equalizer.

As currently implemented I can't use ANY of the DSP per track feature.  Not for just the reason(s) above, but because the DSP selection template used is the same as the global dsp defines for that play zone.  WTF?  Convolution, Room Correction, Headphones, would be controlled per song  or group of songs until it was eventually negated.  VST's as DSP's are completely disregarded.  You have to have unique control of each play zone (global settings) and separately settings that can be set/unset per track, regardless of what zone it's playing in.  It's TRACK DSP not SYSTEM DSP at that level.

I understand that a lot of the logic behind this is to reuse existing resources and avoid redundant code... But please, not to this extent.

Sorry guys, but it's currently Useless.

[Arindelle]

I don't understand the logic for this.   WTF?  Convolution, Room Correction, Headphones, would be controlled per song  or group of songs until it was eventually negated.  VST's as DSP's are completely disregarded.  You have to have unique control of each play zone (global settings) and separately settings that can be set/unset per track, regardless of what zone it's playing in.  It's TRACK DSP not SYSTEM DSP at that level.

I understand that a lot of the logic behind this is to reuse existing resources and avoid redundant code... But please, not to this extent.

Sorry guys, but it's currently Useless.

Seriously?

"WTF", "useless", "silly" ?! Pushing the right buttons there. What ever happened to "I have a suggestion, would it be possible to ..." or "I think it would be a good idea if ..."."

People are bending over backwards to give a very small minority of users some pretty esoteric functionality. Most people do not feel the need to change polarity on the fly, and most people do not need (or want) VSTs, not to mention changes to their EQ loaded per track.

If I were one of the developers,  I would not find this type of criticism either motivating or constructive.  

[bblue]

I've continued this last section of the thread to the DSP LOAD/SAVE thread at:
http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=91361.msg628939#msg628939

--Bill

[theoctavist]

it is inaudible, this polarity "issue"
certainly not a sound quality metric.

[bblue]

it is inaudible, this polarity "issue"
certainly not a sound quality metric.

Not so.  Absolute polarity of a non-electric musical instrument (and even some of them!) is quite audible on a good, transparent, revealing system.  It's true that most folks, non-musicians, non-engineers, non-discerning listeners, etc., wouldn't notice it, but the rest of us do.

--Bill

[soongsc]

DSP Presets is a new feature in MC20. There is a new tag called DSP. In the DSP Studio there is now a Load/Save DSP button. This lets you switch polarity, for example, and then save as a DSP Preset. You could call it "Reverse Polarity." For all the songs that you want to switch polarity, you just click the DSP tag and select "Reverse Polarity." Now the polarity will switch on a song by song basis in a single playlist.

The current limitation is that the DSP stays switched until another song's DSP tag switches it to something else. This means you need both an Original Polarity and a Reverse Polarity DSP and all files need to be tagged.

The Zone method requires a separate playlist for each zone.

If I have to go though even 1000 or more albums, it would be too complicated, and would be even more trouble if a bug messes things up.  I think if it were part of the ripping operation, it would be fine.  But not after.  I guess I will just have to look at other options.