OOPS

Bill Low, the head cable guru at Audioquest frequently is a guest poster on Paul's Post. He sent me this interesting note I wanted to share with you. It concerns our discussion on absolute polarity.

My first awareness of the phenomenon was due to the advocacy of Trevor Lees, the Australian who I think marketed a modified Dyna preamp or something like that in the mid-70’s. Trevor named those with an appropriate awareness, the Out Of Phase Society, OOPS.

Almost concurrently, David Fletcher of Sumiko also promoted absolute phase awareness among his dealers.

I used to mark the inside of every LP album jacket with a “+” or a "-" to indicate whether I should reverse the positive and negative speaker leads. Compilation albums were often a frustration as each track might have different absolute phase … and many albums, such as a few years later Rickie Lee Jones first eponymous album, were even more frustrating because the voice and the instruments were out of phase. (“Last Chance Texaco” was for a long time my favored track for setting VTA/SRA, her “cold” could easily be exaggerated or almost cured.)

In addition to George Louis’s explanation as to why a voice is that much more sensitive to absolute phase, voice is simply always the highest priority for me … the human to human thing.

Maybe it’s a convenient rationalization, because having to listen for and do something about absolute phase is a pain! … but CDs seem to have correct absolute phase a significantly greater % of the time than did LPs.