Meat Plow wrote:
On Wed, 02 Jan 2008 17:11:29 +0000, Arfa Daily wrote:

wrote in message
...
Hello all...

I recently installed a radio and stereo speakers in my car. The
speakers were a trashpicking find and they seem to work just fine. At
the time I wired them up, I didn't know which terminals represented +
and - on the speakers, so I took a guess and wired them both the same
way. The speakers had no marking to indicate polarity, other than a
"thin" spade lug for one terminal.

Just the other night I found the box the speakers were in. It has a
detailed wiring diagram on the side. According to the diagram I have
reversed the + and - connections on both speakers.

Over the years I've read a number of different views on the effect of
wiring speakers with reversed polarity. I've heard everything from "it
won't really matter if the speakers are both wired the same way" to
"the sound won't be as good because the speaker cone will pull inward
instead of being pushed out".

It wouldn't be hard to fix, but should I bother correcting the
polarity?

William
I've never known it to matter, as long as they are both wired the same way
round, as you say. Reverse wiring just one will result in a lack of bass and
a 'woolly' stereo image, as I'm sure you are aware. If you think about it,
any waveform driving them will have a pretty symmetrical count of positive
and negative half cycles of largely similar amplitude, so there is no real
reason why the speaker moving back, at a time when the diaphragm in the
microphone that made the original recording was moving forward, should have
any effect. The theory also assumes that the phase relationship was
maintained throughout the entire recording process, and that there is no
inversion taking place in amplifier stages in your player, that isn't
reversed again, by the time the signal reaches the output terminals ...

Arfa

It would matter for impulses from the waveform say as in a drum beat?
Wouldn't the beat of a kick drum cause the speaker cone to move inward if
the polarity is reversed? This certainly wouldn't be suitable for a sound
reinforcement system.


One might think that, but flipping the polarity on a kik drum mike has
little if any effect on the sound through the PA. Sometimes I mike a
bass drum from both sides, using a 'bassdrum' mike on the front head and
a normal instrument mike on the batter head. Reversing the polarity of
the batter head mike does make a difference in this instance.
Ron(UK)