> It's clearer than it was because I ducked the bass.

That's the lazy way.

And phasing has an effect at any frequency. That's science. Go ahead a make a comb at any frequency and tell me you don't hear anything. We have plugins that create phasing for effect and not just in the bass frequencies. Simply put, you clearly don't understand the physics and mechanics underlying sound production, and I'm not going to argue further. You're just wrong.

What you're describing is the physical effect that too much bass has on a speaker diaphragm and how it effects the output of other frequencies on that physical medium, and the listener's perception thereof. That's not phasing.

Phasing is the effect of the combined polarity of current in a wire has on the movement of the speaker diaphragm due to the simultaneous receipt of opposite currents.

You can also have phasing in the air as between the monitors, but then you're brining in a lot into the calculation, i.e. the room, the materials, and output positioning. You can't control where the listener is though, so you can't worry about that, best you can do is a/b/c check, pink noise tests, white noise tests, etc.

If I have multiple guitar tracks of the same riff to thicken the mix, they better be time and phase aligned or it kills the beef. The same is true when you have multiple mics on the same drum. Two mics have to especially be checked, because they may be mechanically reversed, or off due to positioning.

If you want a mediocre mix, be lazy. If you want a crisp, punchy mix, you'll study the phases and adjust as possible given what you have. There are plugins to help compare tracks.

Yes, nudging a 100 tracks takes time, but there's a reason Def Leppard's Hysteria took several months to engineer, and they did that before having all of the modern tools.