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What Are Phase Inversion Switches?

If you are doing your own music recording, then you need to know about the phase inverter switch on your microphones or mixing equipment. This switch plays an important role in music recording. It helps reduce distortion and interference. To understand how it works, you need a little background in the science of sound.

Sound and Interference
- Sounds are waves in the air. A single tone, or frequency, takes the shape of a sine wave, which has regular undulations up and down. Complex sounds like those of a voice or a guitar are made up out of simple sine waves added together to form complex waves. This happens because of a property of waves known as interference. When two waves line up peak to peak and trough to trough, they are said to be "in phase." The result is a more powerful wave. When they line up peak to trough they are said to be "out of phase," and cancel each other out. When they are neither completely in phase nor completely out of phase, they reinforce each other in some places and cancel each other in others.
Recording and Interference
- Interference causes problems during music recording. Sound takes time to travel. If you are using multiple microphones for recording, the sound from any one instrument will not reach all of the microphones at the same time. This delay can cause the same sounds to have different phases in different microphones. When they are mixed together, the interference can muffle or distort the sound. This problem occurs even when using just one microphone: sound bounces off walls, ceilings and floors, often arriving at the microphone out of phase with the original sound.
Phase Inversion Switches and Distortion
- A phase inversion switch allows you to flip over, or invert, the phase of a signal in a microphone or mixing board. When the switch is thrown, the peaks of the sound waves turn into troughs, and the troughs turn into peaks. This allows you to change the way that interference happens, giving you a tool to reduce unwanted distortion and muffling.
Phase Inversion Switches and Tone Adjustment
- Phase inversion switches have another use as well. Even when there is no distortion due to interference, switching the phase on one of the microphones in a multi-microphone recording changes its timbre. This allows you to play with different tone combinations and actually improve the quality of the recording.

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