Restoring Patches From Tape

Good tip from David Hillel Wilson, curator of the New England Synthesizer Museum.

"There is an issue with downloading synth patch tapes from the Internet, and it goes like this: The Human ear can't hear absolute phase, so that an up sawtooth sounds exactly like a down sawtooth. However, the cassette input circuits on most synths CAN hear absolute phase. Many of the .WAV files are inverted, either by the sound card the poster used to digitize them, or the sound card you used to play them back. The answer here is crazy, but it works: After trying with no success for several hours to load up an OB-Xa from an Internet wave file, I tried this: I took two alligator clip leads and an extra patch cord, and used them to swap the ground and the hot on the EAR output jack on the cassette tape recorder. It loaded on the first try! You can also run the sound through any inverting mixer (such as on the ElectroComp 200). I have tried to send this info (and the Sequential Split Eight factory sounds as an .SYX) to the website that hosts these files, but my messages keep bouncing back."

Update via swissdoc in the comments: "Why not just inverting it in your soundeditor before saving from the soundcard to tape?"