Polarization—The Earth is not flat and your sound shouldn’t be either.

Polarization—The Earth is not flat and your sound shouldn’t be either.

Nearly all of us want full, rich, big, round sound, with a stereophonic sound-field that is swim-through-it dense—we want realistic and expansive. Connect your loudspeakers so one pushes while the other pulls and you will not get what you are striving for. (If you want lean, flat, diffused and confused sound then sure, go ahead, connect your speakers out of phase.) So unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise, always connecting left and right speakers to your amplifier so the red post on your amplifier connects with red post on the loudspeaker, and black to black, and on both channels. Assuming other components in your system are operating correctly, this ensures both speakers push and pull in unison, which is to say in-phase, and not a bad usage of the term phase as you do want both left and right speakers to behave the same, being in-phase relative to each other.

Polarity has to do with electric charge as well as magnetic field orientation. Polarity as a word is commonly used as something like shorthand concerning vector forces which have polar aspect—positive/negative, north/south, left hand/right hand axial rotation… Right Hand Rule for those looking for more.

Phase is relative to a reference, just like decibel. To say your loudspeakers are in-phase is correct enough and communicates the concept that both speakers are working together—both move outward at the same time creating a compression wave event in air (cone/membrane moving toward observer) at the same time with the same signal from source, and both move inward at the same time creating rarefaction (cone/membrane moving away from observer). But to say your sound system is in-phase is a bit wooly, it doesn’t communicate any real information, requiring assumptions to be made. Sure, sound system engineers commonly perform system-phase tests, and they communicate in shorthand. A system phase test generally means that when a signal with positive charge is sent into the system’s electrical input the result is that all loudspeakers create a disturbance in air that leads with a compression (positive impulse) which is to say that the loudspeaker membranes accelerate toward the observer for the vast majority of the bass frequency region creating a sound wave that leads with compression and not rarefaction.

Absolute Phase, a further complication. Absolute phase brings the whole of the recording process into the picture. Absolute phase is a thing in and of itself, but cannot be understood without the above framework. We’ll pick this back up next week diving into what absolute phase means to audiophiles, engineers and what that actually means to your sound and why it might and might not make a difference to you.