Steely Dan
Alive In America

This CD has inverted audio polarity, and must be heard with its polarity inverted to appreciate it. It was recorded and mixed in analog, and the output of the mixer was digitized with an Apogee AD-1000 20-bit ADC and then converted to the CD-format with a UV-22 encoder, which produces 16-bit recordings which sound like 20-bit recordings. The result is extremely detailed sound quality, but I gather that few people have ever appreciated it because CD players in 1995 were generally still lousy due to "CD sound" (pre-ringing related to passband-ripple in the digital interpolation filters on DAC-chips, which was fixed in about 2005). Then there's the polarity error, which makes the CD sound "veiled" and lifeless. Most modern DACs and players have good DAC-chips, but based on my PC, not all modern PCs use good DAC-chips, which are crucial for getting the best sound quality. Very little new consumer gear has a polarity-control, although the top-rated Benchmark DAC3 ($2K) and Audio Research preamps ($$$) do. So, you can flip the polarity of each speaker connection, or use an audio editor to invert .wavs or FLACs (must be a lossless format to notice effects of changing the polarity).