You're hearing what I do so I guess its not my imagination.
I describe the audibility of absolute polarity on sax this way:
Positive is mellower with more bell, smoother, rounder, more forward.
Negative is more reed, lip, spitty, sucked-in, hollow and honky.
Very technical-sounding. LOL.
I hear polarity on drums as well.
Many years ago I did a LF toneburst test to simulate the impulse of a kick and the differences were large.
Positive was hitting me in the chest and impactful, negative made me hear the first-order echo slap off the hard wall behind me.
By means of simple control polarity reversal odd-order expansive distortion can be made with the Waveulator.
When the input level increases above threshold the gain goes up exponentially.
A little expansion goes a long way.
It creates headroom problems if not managed.
Compressive saturation occurs when magnetics, tape, electronics etc run out of linearity.
We don't have many examples of expansive distortion that occur "in nature."
Two that readily come to mind are magnetic tape without bias and severely under-biased class-B amplifiers.
Not something you hear everyday.
For an effect, expansive distortion is the way to go with the Waveulator.
Instead of adding harmonics that ultimately subtract level from the waveform to make compressive distortion expansive distortion increases the waveform.
Here is a sample of Frank Turner's "Blackout" unprocessed and with some expansive odd-order distortion added.
There are some overs in the processed file.
Since the RMS level increased in the processed file I reduced its' level to be closer to the original.
The transients really pop.
Sound file: https://proaudiodesignforum.com/content ... arison.wav
