How do you judge your system's neutrality?

“If, after changing a system element, (1) individual pieces of music sound more unique, and (2) your music collection sounds more diverse, then your system is contributing less of its own signature to the music. And less signature means more neutral.”

Not necessarily!

System Neutrality may not be the cause to it’s improved level of detail and musical uniqueness. Other factors may be involved.

Example:
If one were to wear yellow glasses while skiing during an overcast day, visual improvement in the snow's light and dark shadow detail would apparent. Those same glasses on a bright day would not be beneficial.

The improvements in your system may have actually increased the level of contrast above and beyond the original instruments of the musician.

This brings up another important point. If the music through your new system truly sounded better and this fact was agreed upon by fellow Audiophiles (with similar likes and dislikes); why does it matter that it does not sound like the original recording. ‘The absolute Sound –system Neutral.’ We don't even know if the original recording actually sounded like the performer. Was it enhanced by the engineer to compensate for the recording deficiencies or those of the musician?

The end product is for your enjoyment. If rose colored glasses and Woody Allen's Orgasmatron would heighten my experience, then it would and should be part of my listening routine.

Sound Improvement beats Neutrality

I won't call my system neutral. I'll say it's somewhere in the middle of the road. Being that the shape of my ears are different than yours, and that they don't protrude from my noggin much, you may find my system bright, since I need a little more top-end to make it sound correct to me. If I cup my hands behind my ears, it sounds bright. But since most of the music flows past me, I don't notice it being bright. So is my system bright, or is it middle of the road? Someone who's ears protrude would say bright. I say neutral. Who's correct? We both are.

So far, the majority of posters seem to be Subjectivists with regard to system neutrality. That is to say, they believe (1) that there is no real distinction between a more or less neutral system, or (2) if there is a distinction, it is not one that is particularly valuable to audiophiles.

Are there any Objectivists out there?

Nice posts again, guys! Vandermeulen, you make my main point much more simply than I did - everyone must decide for themselves through experience what they want their system to sound like.

However, I must repeat that there is no such thing as absolute neutrality. Any piece of audio equipment is going to contribute some "coloration." By way of explanation, let me go back to the recording studio example. These are almost always rooms that are almost completely dead. This is not because the engineer is trying to emulate some sort of absolute neutrality, as someone suggested. In fact, it is for the completely opposite reason - so the engineer can play with the recording and make it sound exactly how he wants it to via instrument placement, miking, mixing, and almost always the addition of digital effects that do not actually exist in the music being recorded. In other words, the engineer is eliminating what he calls "room noise" as much as possible and putting his own "coloration" onto the recording. And every single engineer will have a completely different idea of what this ideal "coloration" is, just as every acoustician will have a different idea of what an ideal concert hall should sound like.

Same thing with designers of audio equipment. They all have a very specific idea of the sound they are looking for when they start out, otherwise what the heck is the point?! They are trying to create something that sounds like their ideal, and every one of them will have a slightly different conception of it. This is what creates "system-induced coloration," as someone put it.

So in the end, Cbw723 is correct, I think - it doesn't really matter exactly how one defines these terms, as everyone is going to have a slightly different conception of them, and their own set of preferences. One can only decide what one's own ideal is for a piece of equipment (and how it matches up with other pieces of equipment in the system, of course) by experience. Someone who listens to almost entirely electronically-produced music is almost certainly going to have a very different opinion about all types of equipment to someone who listens almost exclusively to acoustic instruments, for instance. As for the question "is there a way to know if I'm hearing the music better, or just my system," I reply that again there are no absolutes here. Even assuming you are referencing live music (which not all audiophiles do - some of them, for various reasons, do not want their systems to sound anything like live music), there are many different types of venues and sounds, so your ideal may be very different from mine. That's another reason why there are so many different types of audio equipment out there - there are many different tastes, and no one of them is inherently right or wrong. It depends on what your sonic priorities are, and only you can determine that, through experience listening to different types of equipment and systems, always referencing this to your ideal of what live music should sound like, realizing that your system can never really recreate this.

Speaking of trying to recreate the live event, I should add, Byron, that no, I don't agree that the "least amount of coloration" will result in the closest thing to live music, necessarily - in fact, many (though of course not all) systems I have heard described as neutral actually sounded lifeless, without any sense of space, color, ambience, etc. - nothing like live music. My point is that just as all live music is "colored", so is all reproduced music - one must choose the type of "coloration" one wants in one's system. If any ten audiophiles assemble a system that they consider very close to whatever their conception of "neutrality" is, I guarantee you will have ten completely different sounding systems.

Byron, Isn't that sort of an oxymoron, an 'objective' audiophile. What would you like him to be objective about?

The is almost an artform exercise and is almost totally, from cradle to grave, based on someones opinions about the best manner to record the music, the miking/mixing, the putting on a recording medium, the design of the hardware, most especially the speakers, as well as the sensitivities of the audiophile in thier selection, matching, and room selection and set up.

What is there to be objective about - everything in the chain, including the end users, is based on someone's personal decisions in what they liked best and thought conveyed the music the best for their audience. Some times they succeeded, sometimes they failed. But they were never objective in any sense that I can understand. There was no science. It still all boiled down to how they valued what they heard. Pretty subjective I think.............