Manual contents

Phase Coherence controls

Phase Coherence is the polarity and all-pass side of PhaseLock. It changes how tracks combine without moving their transients.

Choosing the Phase Reference

  1. Select a lane in the group you want to edit.
  2. Open Phase Reference / Group n.
  3. Choose the track that should anchor the group’s phase relationship.

Only lanes from the selected group appear. The chosen reference keeps its source phase and polarity. Other lanes in the group are compared with it.

Improve Coherence

Select a non-reference lane and enable Improve Coherence to apply its measured polarity and all-pass correction. This setting is on by default.

Disable it when you want that lane to keep its current phase behavior while the rest of the group remains processed. The setting does not alter Time Alignment.

The phase anchor

Each lane’s coherence is measured and corrected against one anchor lane. Phase Anchor chooses it:

  • AUTO, the default, picks the anchor for you: the lane’s Time Reference when it has one, otherwise the group Phase Reference. When the analysis finds a partner with clearly stronger shared low-frequency evidence, AUTO uses that partner instead. The AUTO entry names the lane it resolved to; a LOW tag means the evidence behind the automatic choice was weak.
  • FOLLOW TIME TARGET anchors to the lane’s Align To target.
  • GROUP REFERENCE anchors directly to the group’s Phase Reference.
  • A specific lane fixes the anchor yourself.

Anchoring composes through chains: a lane anchored to a processed lane stays coherent with that lane and, through it, with the group reference. The coherence graph always shows the lane against its actual anchor.

Automatic and manual polarity

With Use Auto, PhaseLock uses the polarity measured during analysis. The Invert control overrides that decision.

Use a manual override when:

  • You know a cable, preamp, or microphone path was polarity-inverted.
  • The recording contains material that confused the automatic measurement.
  • A deliberate inversion gives the intended sound in context.

Make the decision while listening to the microphones together. A soloed polarity flip often sounds identical.

Coherence: On and Bypassed

The global Coherence control reaches every unlocked group. Switching it to Bypassed bypasses polarity and all-pass processing while preserving every lane’s configured setting. A locked group keeps the state it was measured under.

Use this control for a matched comparison. When you switch it on again, each lane returns to its previous state.