How do you judge your system's neutrality?

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.............

Here is what I have gained from everyone's input:

Neutrality is a difficult ideology to wrap one's brain around, and most likely will remain that way. Because of this, experience plays a very important role in attaining one's own ideologies of defining neutrality. One ultimate realization is that the recording environment, specifically concerning the engineer's own summation of what sounds "right", will always remain subjective and a mystery to the person contemplating these notions from their listening chair. As far as the designer of high end equipment, cost factor will be a variable that can/will determine the end results, but only to a certain degree.

A new "fad" will gain noteriety after Abucktwoeighty's findings on ear geology. I predict plastic surgions will see a rise in audiophile related "tweaks", where cheaper vs. more expensive ear tweaking operations will lead to many arguements over why a 50,000 dollar ear operation can resolve more than a 10,000 dollar ear operation. Abucktwoeighty...thanks for the horror.

Learsfool - Excellent post. I don't think we are much closer to agreeing with each other, but I definitely understand and appreciate your point of view better now.

Your observations about recordings being colored is well taken. I have spent time in mixing stages and I know how much "coloration" is added to a typical recording. Neutrality is not a virtue in the recording studio. It is a virtue in the playback system. By having a playback system that is as neutral as possible, you will be closest to hearing WHAT WAS HEARD IN THE RECORDING STUDIO, and therefore you will be closest to hearing the INTENTIONS OF THE ARTIST (and the intentions of the recording engineer, and the studio executive, and the studio executive's five year old child...but that is a lamentation for another day). The point is that what makes for good recording (namely, coloration) and what makes for good playback (namely, neutrality) are different, and often opposite.

Learsfool wrote:
"However, I must repeat that there is no such thing as absolute neutrality."

I agree with this, if it means: No component or system is perfectly neutral. I disagree with this, if it means: There is nothing against which we can measure the neutrality of a component or system. Which brings me to...

Newbee - I wasn't suggesting that audiophiles should be "objective." An Objectivist is not someone who is objective. An Objectivist is someone who believes that there is such a thing as truth. An Objectivist, with respect to sonic neutrality, therefore, is a person who believes that components and systems can be evaluated as to their "truthfulness." Sometimes you hear that expressed in terms of "what is on the recording." Other times you hear that expressed in terms of the real-world event that the recording captured. I would express it in terms of what was heard in the recording studio when the artist and engineer leaned back in their chairs and said, "We're done. Let's take a listen." Of course, we can't compare our systems to what they heard without a time machine, but I don't think that means we must abandon the idea of neutrality (now: truthfulness) in a playback system. It means we must find other ways to determine the neutrality of a playback system, which is precisely why, I believe, we need to operationalize the term 'neutrality.' That was the goal in my original post.

To put another one of my cards on the table: I am an Objectivist, in the sense above, with respect to sonic neutrality. That is to say, I believe that some components and systems reproduce recordings more truthfully than others.

As to the doubt, expressed by several posters, that neutrality is a vital consideration in assembling a satisfying music system, I am actually somewhat agnostic. In my (admittedly limited) experiences, the changes to my system that resulted in greater neutrality (now: truthfulness) were the same changes that resulted in more musical enjoyment for me. But I am open to the idea that this was just an accident of my personal upgrade history.

Newbee, there's a lot to be objective about. In GET BETTER SOUND, Jim Smith makes a case (tip #171) that the "personal taste" argument is flawed. He argues that if there were perfect speakers, almost everyone would prefer them. In fact, his whole book is dedicated to getting the system out of the way so you can get closer to the "live" sound of your music.

I don't even understand the subjectivist argument. I can imagine listening to a specific piece of music and thinking "they should have mixed the percussion higher" or "that should have been a cello not a bass" or "they should have upped the tempo there." But I can't imagine saying "all music should have more X," where "X" is some factor imposed by the playback system (except, of course, where X = "fidelity to the source"). What would it be that you'd want your system to add (that isn't in the source) to everything you listen to? Bass? Treble? Harmonics? Rap lyrics? It's all distortion that might make some music sound better to you, but other music will certainly sound worse.

And this is, I think, the source of Bryon's observation in the original post. When you remove a bit of system distortion, different things sound more different because a common element has been removed from everything you hear.