Quote Originally Posted by DonR View Post
That’s right but it does make you wonder why they use the language they did in the engineering standard document for the LE5-12.
JBL models of this era (generally) wired the leg from the crossover to the drivers in a consistent configuration. The solid wire to the driver connected to the positive terminal of the driver, the black stripe or solid black connects to the negative terminal. Green was used for the woofer, white for the mid, yellow for the high, and orange for the ultra high in 4-ways. Likely keeping this wire configuration consistent was needed for the assembly lines.

If you follow the "positive" leg of the three drivers in the Tech Sheet you will see that the polarity inversion was made back at the connections at the speaker input. The woofer and tweeter positive terminals are fed from the speaker black input, the midrange from the speaker red input.

Once you can get comfortable with this wiring configuration you need to allow for JBL's standard whereby a positive signal applied to the "positive" terminal of the drivers actually results in an inward movement of the cone/diaphragm. Contrary to expectations, of course.

There are characteristics of certain crossover slope designs that result in a phase shift in a narrow band around the crossover point. The phase shift can cause significant response variations due to the two drivers operating across this frequency point. Wiring one of the drivers in opposite polarity can mitigate some, but not all, of the response variations. So wiring the mid in opposite polarity won't harm the driver but will affect the response of the system as originally designed.