I had a hard time SLEEPING last night. I couldn't stop thinking about how many recordings of mine are fuct. I literally almost always run a matrix. The last 2 track recording I made was in August I think. I rarely run V3> VX Pocket. Except at Matt Murphys Pub which is the only place I go with no real sound reinforcement. I think have made at least 200 recordings with the V3 and AES outputs. A good chunk of those were full multitracks in which I might use the V3 for bass and kick drum, or overheads, or a piano, etc... I do most often use them for a stereo pair of rooms mics. I don't even have stuff notated well enough to know for sure what channels ran through my V3 for my backed up recordings. I usually right everything down on paper but no text file and never have time to fill in the notes on a session.
It now makes a lot more sense as to why I would have such a hard time finding a place to line up files for a matrix. Obviously I wouldn't line up the audio to be proper with the polarity 180 degrees off. This means I have been finding somewhere that is a few milliseconds off and then EQing. What I mean is that I would match a positive compression for each track. So now knowing the V3's channel was actually negative rarefactions swapped I know I had been mixing them out of phase and off by some milliseconds. No wonder why I am NEVER 100% happy with my mixes.
Last night I opened an Apollo Sunshine recording I was working on. Actually I had finished it but luckily I had not erased the session. I found a section where the bass was feeding back a low drone and there was one kick drum hit. Nothing else. I soloed the V3 channel. I looped a small section and let it play many times. I inserted a phase inversion plug in. I would bypass the plug in when the 3 second sample repeated. I heard a minor pitch change. Not a half step but some amount of cent. I think I'll try to make a mp3 clip to post. It is true that a single stereo track is not "night and day" different with the positive and negative info swapped but it is definitly different. Even if it is only a mathmatical/microscopic difference.
I am REALLY REALLY REALLY unhappy right now.
As I and someone else mentioned... I wonder how long they knew and why there was no mention until we figured it out. Was it someones decision to say that thy should just fix the new ones and hope nobody notices?
If all my stuff was two track I wouldn't be that upset. I would just be wasting a shitload of media I have it backed up to and could fix a recording with minimal effort. Well I guess there is the fact that however many people have the origional improper recording anyway. The point is that I can't just flip the polarity of all of these matrixes and multitracks.