so I got busy at work and had this composed. I'm hitting post anyway even though parts are redundant now.
In fact, I'd argue that EQ tends to introduce artifiacts, and smears details and the subtle timing required to accurately recreate a detailed soundstage. Though it may not always seem that way - a cymbal may seem more solidly fixed in the soundstage because you EQ it and bring it's frequencies up.
This is interesting to me, I've been under the impression that you could EQ a suitably flat source to sound however you want. I hadn't thought that a pre could have that sort of influence on the overall image/soundstage on the recording.
It's less of an issue with spot micing as you define placement in the soundstage later, but for "room recordings" that sort of stuff is largely set in stone when you do the placement of gear and your downstream gear is retaining detail or warping it in some way. Both approaches have benefits, it's just a personal preference issue. I agree though, EQ definitely has the potential to introduce artifacts such as smear. It's not always, and sometimes thats ok, but everything you do (including setup and gear chains through post production) will affect what you start with and what you can get later. I find it's a trade; sometimes it's worth trading detail for euphoria and smear, and other times it's not.
Okay, which one of you guys put your batteries in backwards?
If we had a third source, we could use it to compare but there isn't one on archive. Of course that wouldn't be conclusive.
One thing to look at are drum hits. I'd expect the first peak impulses to be positive. In the case of jmbell's source, I see that those are always negative. So it is fairly likely that source has the polarity issue.
How excatly can you tell that polarity is reversed?? If it is my source the problem would have be the Tinybox or 1/8 to 1/8 cable. Here is another source with the same setup is the polarity off here?? I'm not understanding how you have determined this.
Zoom in on a drum hit. Negative polarity is generally a non-starter in terms of problems, and it's certainly fixable in post by flipping the polarity. It could have been caused by a bunch of things, a recorder preamp pin expectation, cable wiring flips, even feeding a negative voltage to capsules would induce polarity issues (I vaguely remember the lemosax could do that with some capsules unless cables were wired differently). Two things to keep in mind: 1) Keep polarity together (don't have a left channel as positive and a right as negative). You should be able to hear it, but it has a tendency to hose the soundstage of a recording. 2) Don't mix negative polarity, you end up creating nasty cancellation results. That's an oversimplification, but thats the two reasons to use positive polarity, otherwise as long as your two channels don't get mixed with another set of mics or a sbd and you keep both channels as the same polarity, it doesn't (really) matter.
But a question about seeing polarity: with a positive polarity, that will mean the peaks will generally be positive correct? These might not be the best examples, but here are some shots of one track from a couple weeks ago. I thought this would be positive. Not sure though.
http://imgur.com/a/2N2Im
zoom in more. Create a sharp drum hit or hand clap and look.