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Old 04-05-2013, 09:35 PM   #109
medicine tactic
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Join Date: Aug 2012
Location: central Texas
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Default Replace "Phase" with "Polarity"

I'm sure this has been discussed around here at length somewhere, but I'm not finding it.

Basically, what Reaper calls "Phase" is more correctly called "Polarity".

For anyone who's not aware of the difference, this is a pretty good summary. Here's the crux of it:

Quote:
What's confusing about the '180 degrees out of phase' term is that it is sometimes used to refer to a situation where the second channel has not been delayed, but has had its waveform flipped upside down, so that the peaks become troughs and vice versa — a process more unambiguously referred to as polarity reversal. This scenario also results in silence at the combined output, hence the common confusion in terminology, but it's very important to realise that the total phase cancellation here is brought about by inverting one of the waveforms, not by delaying it. In this example, it might seem like we're splitting hairs, but in practice the distinction between time delays and polarity becomes much more important.
This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine, since I was myself mislead for years by the misinformation in the audio world. So, in the interest of correctness, and of not contributing to the confusion around this subject, I would very much like Reaper to replace "Phase" with "Polarity".
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