Sierra out of phase?

[wish]

I set my Sierra speakers up last night and ran the speaker setup from my Yamaha receiver. I'm getting a warning that the FR speaker is out of phase. I checked all the wiring and the polarity seems to be correct.

Any one else have this happen? Suggestions?

[Mag_Neato]

Have you tried reversing the wire connections on the suspect speaker and re-running the setup? If you have, and it still came up as out of phase, then I am at a loss.

[wish]

Have you tried reversing the wire connections on the suspect speaker and re-running the setup? If you have, and it still came up as out of phase, then I am at a loss.

No I haven't tried that yet but will tonight. The thing is the only outcome that is positive is to run setup again and it doesn't say "Out of phase." This is what I'm hoping and if so I'll just chalk it up to a glitch on the first run. The other three possibilities are:

A.) Run the setup again and it still says "Out of phase"...so swap the polarities (i.e. Negative wire to speaker positive and Pos wire to Negative on speaker) & rerun the test. This leads to either of the following:
B.) Swap polarities & it still says "Out of phase." This is the one you mention above and I'd be at a loss...OR...
C.) Swap and it says everything is OK. That doesn't sit well either that I have Neg to Pos and Pos to Neg and it thinks it is in phase.

FYI...When I ran this test with my old speakers everything was OK.

[Mag_Neato]

Knowing how meticulous Dave is with his QC, I'd be surprised if the speaker was wired out of phase internally. He would have caught that when running the test on it before shipping. If it still comes up as out of phase after reversing polarity of wires, try swapping both speakers' positions and re-run it again(i.e. put the left to right, and right to left). Another way to test for phase is to use a DVD that has the THX Optimizer. It includes phase testing.

Good luck!

[davef]

Knowing how meticulous Dave is with his QC, I'd be surprised if the speaker was wired out of phase internally. He would have caught that when running the test on it before shipping.

100% correct... There is really no possible way that a Sierra-1 could leave our facility if it was wired out-of-phase. That being said, if you forward me your serial numbers, I can reference the phase measurements of your speakers to verify.

I have heard of many situations where automated room-equalization systems claim the speakers are out-of-phase, when in reality, they are not.

Phase is very particular for both room placement and distance to the microphone and phase will vary with frequency (it could be that at the particular frequency the measurements use to test phase, these frequencies are indeed out-of-phase) . Try this -- place both speakers adjacent to each other in the center of the room. Place the measurement mic one meter away placed directly in between both speakers and run the same tests.

[Mike^S]

It's usually pretty easy to tell if speakers are out of phase by simply listening to them. When speakers are out of phase the entire sound stage and imaging is destroyed. You'll get a weird 3d effect as if someone turned on some sort of re-verb filter.

Just try switching the red and black wires on the back of one of the speakers and see if it sounds better or worse.

[wish]

Thanks for all the replies.

Well I ran a few more tests and I suspect it is as Dave mentioned above. That is that the "automated room-equalization systems claim the speakers are out-of-phase, when in reality, they are not."

I tried the following:
1.) Reran the test with speaker polarity correct and it now claims BOTH are out of phase.
2.) Switched wire polarity and reran with same results.
3.) Switched polarity back and moved the left speaker to right and vice versa...still says out of phase.

It seems obvious enough that the test is faulty in that it claims the speakers are out of phase. For kicks I'm going to try Dave's suggestion to move the speakers together in the center of the room and move the mic about a meter away. Regardless of the result I'm not concerned.

Again, thanks for the responses.