[Redcarmoose]

This is a never ending question at Head-Fi.

Why?

Well, manufacturers actually use two styles of cable polarity when building an IEM. In fact qdc makes the V14 two different ways. One with positive and negative normal and one with it reversed!

Normally (if reversed) you use special cables with the polarity reversed with qdc and a couple other brands.

Now obviously they also switch the (actual) cable polarity when doing this so the polarity is again correct. Interesting though you also have two trains of though on this subject.

Switching cable polarity means the positive and negative connectors have been modified to support the reverse polarity. Except.........

As one group is routinely putting normal (regular polarity) cables on reversed polarity IEMs and running with it!

Absolute phase can be noted with a drum sound with a DD driver. Still ether way the phase is set still can’t be noted with strings or piano sounds. Also with complex music it is not noticeable. But remember correct phase is in relation to a DD driver moving the air “out” where in this case they are BA drivers which do not move the same way?

So my question....................is it true that the people using reverse polarity on standard polarity ear hooks are getting artifacts with BAs, and of course DDs? Or is an audio effect that is so small that it does not matter? It seems this is actually a big deal, way more of a deal than it’s made out to be?



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Below is a quote from a member who believes it’s meaningless?

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“Yes, my understanding is qdc inverts absolute polarity on its iems, I’m not sure why they do this.

I spent my career in high end home audio, both the retail side and manufacturer’s side. Many of the high end preamps that were released in the 90s and later had invert phase switches which allowed switching the absolute phase of recordings. The reason for this is recording studios do not worry themselves to maintain absolute polarity in its signal chain, so any produced recording may or may not be in absolute polarity. Please understand I’m not speaking about relative polarity where the plus and minus connections are the same between speakers, this type of polarity is mandatory for proper playback else you will have cancellation effects between the loudspeakers and it will be obvious something doesn’t sound right.

Absolute polarity is where an instrument creates a compression wave, as an example, hence the diaphragm of a microphone recording the event moves inward. Ideally in playing back this recording, you want the resulting signal to cause the drivers on your loudspeakers to move outward: this is playback in absolute polarity. If instead, the same recording is out of absolute phase, the loudspeaker driver will go inward, and this effect will cause an audible effect, sometimes subtle in nature, but more often heard with low frequencies. On high end music systems, the effect of this is more audible, so some users will switch the phase invert selector on their preamp back and forth on a given recording to hear which sounds better.

Since there is about a 50% chance any recording in one’s collection may be in absolute phase or not, this is why qdc’s decision to design its iems as they do is a non-issue for cable switchers. I hope that helps explain why I don’t worry about the reversed polarity on my qdc iems. “


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So my question is does it really matter or not? Is this person correct in not worrying about it?

 

[The Jester]

Makes a minute difference to some,
Back in the 90’s my Arcam transport/DAC had a phase invert switch on the DAC as supposedly there was no “absolute phase” on recordings, and maybe at the time the rest of the system wasn’t up to revealing the subtle differences, apparently at the time professional singers were most likely to notice a difference but even if a difference could be appreciated then it would require identification of individual albums after deciding what sounded best and then you’d be resigned to more “fiddling” than listening, a little like those who’s passion is Vinyl and go to the extreme of optimising VTA for individual LP’s…
For the vast majority just ignore and listen to more music …

 

[castleofargh]

When I got my first CIEMs with a 2 pin cable, not knowing if the little dot should be up or down was a time of deep crisis. Not being able to clearly tell which side sounded right should have clearly demonstrated to me that it was irrelevant to my ears, but I'm only saying this now with hindsight smarts. At the time I was more like "omagadomagad what am I gonna do?".

So I think I understand how some people can find this to be important when it's not nearly as important as they think. The handful of guys who can tell by ear, well, they can so they know what's right. As for others, if tyring stuff lead to "IDK which is right/good/nicer", then perhaps just forget about it.

About BA drivers getting artifacts from wrong polarity... How? They oscillate back and forth and react to a simple coil, why would it matter if the very first movement goes one way or the other? I'm sure there a reasoning behind this, but I can't think of what it could be. now imagine an album has some of the tracks mixed in it inverted, would that cause distortions in transducers? why?

For my own peace of mind back in the days, I ended up checking in REW(using a mic to record the IEM) if the impulse response had its main peak up or down. Which over time made me aware that some small cable sellers didn't check their wiring, and that on rare occasions, some manufacturers didn't seem to mind coming up with a product that had inverted polarity(DAP, IEM, whatever). I don't remember which models(because I personally don't care, now ^_^), except for a F111 sent to me for measurement by a fellow audiophile, that had inverted polarity. And MRO's impulse also showed the same on his pair, so maybe that was true of the entire series? IDK.

 

[gregorio]

None of what you quoted makes any sense to me. For example:

The reason for this is recording studios do not worry themselves to maintain absolute polarity in its signal chain, so any produced recording may or may not be in absolute polarity. Please understand I’m not speaking about relative polarity where the plus and minus connections are the same between speakers, this type of polarity is mandatory for proper playback else you will have cancellation effects between the loudspeakers and it will be obvious something doesn’t sound right.

Recording studios use a balanced signal chain, so to avoid the obvious "relative" polarity errors there is no option but to maintain absolute polarity, unless of course you wire every single one of your XLR connectors backwards ("hot" to "cold" and vice versa) and no studio I've ever heard of would do that.

Absolute polarity is where an instrument creates a compression wave, as an example, hence the diaphragm of a microphone recording the event moves inward. Ideally in playing back this recording, you want the resulting signal to cause the drivers on your loudspeakers to move outward: this is playback in absolute polarity.

What recording? How many commercial music recordings consist of just a single instrument recorded with a single mic? At a rough guess, in the last 60 years or so, I would say the number is very roughly zero! Phase is therefore pretty much all over the place and absolute polarity rather meaningless.

G

 

[Redcarmoose]

None of what you quoted makes any sense to me. For example:

Recording studios use a balanced signal chain, so to avoid the obvious "relative" polarity errors there is no option but to maintain absolute polarity, unless of course you wire every single one of your XLR connectors backwards ("hot" to "cold" and vice versa) and no studio I've ever heard of would do that.

What recording? How many commercial music recordings consist of just a single instrument recorded with a single mic? At a rough guess, in the last 60 years or so, I would say the number is very roughly zero! Phase is therefore pretty much all over the place and absolute polarity rather meaningless.

G

Hehe,

The quote that you quoted was not mine.

Between the ———-line is some one else. It’s makes no sense to me ether.

I’m simply trying to get an answer if it matters. So the members that say it does not matter will put “ear-hook” IEMs from normal IEMs with correct polarity onto a reversed polarity IEM.

My question is if both polarities are reversed... is it OK?


The reason you would do it is you had an IEM with earhooks, pointing one way. And it was a reversed polarity, not normal. So you would have the option of using a regular cable, with the regular earhooks. You would hook up the regular earhooks, but the polarity would be uniformly reversed, both sides?

Is that OK to do and would it affect the sound.

 

[gregorio]

The quote that you quoted was not mine.

Yes, I know. That's why I said "what you quoted...", rather than "what you stated...".

My question is if both polarities are reversed... is it OK?

Yes, or at least I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't be OK.

G