Half-wave rectification in the inner ear does not make polarity reversal audible

Evidence

A very long time ago, as part of my self-education about the hearing system, I learned that the basic transduction process in the inner ear performed as a half-wave rectifier. This alone gives one reason to think that acoustic compressions will be heard as different from acoustic rarefactions. We should be sensitive to details in the acoustic waveform as it generates movement of the eardrum and thus initiates the hearing process. Based on this simple logic, phase shifts and absolute polarity should be audible phenomena. We should be able to hear changes in waveforms. … Naturally I did some tests, reversing polarities of loudspeakers, and introducing phase shift to distort musical waveforms—listening for big differences. They weren’t there. At least not in the music I was listening to, through the loudspeakers I was using, from the musical sources I employed. Maybe I was simply unable to hear these things. There were times when I thought I heard subtle differences, but neither one seemed more correct or preferable. Changing loudspeakers made huge differences. Changing records made huge differences. But, the anticipated “dramatic” event of inverting polarity appeared to be missing, despite how appealing the idea of waveform integrity is from an engineering perspective. Are they audible or not, and if so, does it matter in real-world listening? — Toole, Floyd E, Sound reproduction- the acoustics and…, 967

Categorization

• QUESTION: Toole leaves unresolved whether polarity reversals are audible and whether they matter — worth chasing the answer in later psychoacoustics literature.
• XREF: Ties to the reader’s interest in how physical stimuli (eardrum movement) cause perceptual responses; the half-wave rectifier argument is a mechanistic hypothesis that failed empirically.