How do you judge your system's neutrality?

Newbee, Sorry I was inhospitable. Your speculation that the entirety of this thread constitutes trolling is interesting. Even more interesting, the derivation of internet trolling comes from the practice of TROLLING FOR NEWBIES, as popularized by usenet veterans of the early '90s who enjoyed drawing gullible "newbies" into circular discussions. I suppose Bryon could theoretically be a troll, albeit a kind of PHILOSOPHER TROLL. In any case, your choice of the moniker Newbee places you at personal risk of being considered TROLL BAIT.

Bryon, it may be appealing to view neutrality as a phenomenon of both time and frequency domains. I tend to think of imaging and resolution mostly in the frequency category, and dynamics in the time category. However, these are linked characterics, insofar as a well-resolved image frames dynamics within a precise boundary. Taken together these characteristics communicate embodiment. A dislocation of dynamics from imaging in this sense may be considered coloration and therefore a failure of neutrality.

IMO the discussion is ultimately down to an enumeration of the taxonomy of coloration. My last post was about changes in sound that I hear when improvements are made according to generally accepted engineering principals(e.g. Schottky rectification, discrete voltage regulation stages, galvanic separation, low-noise resistors, low-resonance capacitors). Others will likely have different perceptions of coloration.

The appearance of this thread certainly could be evidence of the activity of a troll.

LOL! By posting an on-topic discussion on the application of a term that is in common use within the community, he's a troll? Somebody alert the authorities.

I thought the term Troll was reserved for folks who posted threads on controversial subjects in which people are known to have strong diverse opinions and resolution is not possible.

No, in this context a troll would be someone who posts off-topic, insulting, disparaging, and generally rude comments, with no other goal than to disrupt an otherwise civil discussion.

Meanwhile, back in the on-topic world, I think I’ve come up with a theoretical explanation for Bryon’s observations. My earlier mention of entropy got me thinking about another kind of entropy: Shannon entropy in information theory. The entropy I mentioned previously was thermodynamic entropy, for which organization and entropy are inversely related (i.e., more entropy implies less organization, and vice versa). But Shannon entropy describes the predictability of a variable (or process).

The prototypical example to demonstrate Shannon entropy is of a “fair” coin. (A fair coin is one with an equal probability of coming up heads or tails when flipped.) Such a coin is maximally unpredictable and, because there are two possible outcomes, has one bit of entropy (i.e., you need one bit of information to communicate the result of the next flip). A coin that always comes up one way (either heads or tails), is entirely predictable, and therefore has zero bits of entropy. A coin that is biased (i.e., one result is more probable than the other) has entropy somewhere between zero and one, depending on how biased it is.

The main point here is:
Higher entropy => less predictability
Lower entropy => more predictability

What does this have to do with music and playback systems? Everything. Consider the information in the source (the music) to have some amount of entropy, X. (Interestingly, and perhaps helpfully, X will be a measure of how much the source can be compressed without loss.) The colorations/distortions are processes that reduce that entropy. Why? Because those processes are predictable. This is not to say they are fixed, or constant (we’ve discussed processes that are frequency dependent, for example), but they are predictable in that their effect on a signal may be known. And because they conceal/corrupt/eliminate some source information and replace it with predictable information, they reduce (at output) the original entropy of the source to something less than X.

Consider a system that when you play a source, it puts out a 60Hz hum. This system delivers a zero-entropy playback. It is maximally predictable. If you improve the system so that some of the source material starts poking through the hum, the entropy increases. Entropy is maximized when the source is played back with minimal predictable content, (and the only source of unpredictable content is the source itself).

So, getting back to Bryon’s observations, the reason that a more neutral system causes timbres/songs/albums to sound more unique and their ranges sound more diverse, is because they literally are more unique/diverse upon delivery to the ears. Which is to say they have higher entropy.

This also explains our intuitive notion that while some colorations may be desirable, they will still tend to homogenize the music.

This also helps put to rest my concerns over the issue of excess contrast requiring a modification of the terms of the operationalization. The Rube Goldberg machine (as Bryon put it) that I proposed was meant to be one endpoint in the continuum of contrast (the sine wave generator being the other). But to enhance contrast my machine replaced sounds from the source (and more generally the set of all recorded music) with sounds from the (larger) set of all recorded sound. So, I effectively increased the entropy, but I did it by bringing non-source information into the system. Which is cheating because real audio systems don’t do that. The only source (of which I am aware) of outside information (other than the source) that enters an audio system is the power. Power fluctuations and noise on the line, to the extent that they are stochastic processes, would act to increase entropy (and to the extent that they are not stochastic processes, would decrease entropy). But my guess is that their nature is such that they would not act to increase perceived contrast in the music. In any event, I think the notion that the operationalization would push us toward systems of excess contrast can be dispensed with.

Dgarretson – Thanks for clarifying your view on “embodiment.” It is a fascinating topic in its own right. I agree with you that a taxonomy of colorations would be very useful in these discussions. I will spend some time thinking about possible taxonomic schemes. BTW, you are one of funniest posters I’ve seen on A’gon.

Cbw wrote:

Consider the information in the source (the music) to have some amount of entropy, X. (Interestingly, and perhaps helpfully, X will be a measure of how much the source can be compressed without loss.) The colorations/distortions are processes that reduce that entropy. Why? Because those processes are predictable. This is not to say they are fixed, or constant (we’ve discussed processes that are frequency dependent, for example), but they are predictable in that their effect on a signal may be known. And because they conceal/corrupt/eliminate some source information and replace it with predictable information, they reduce (at output) the original entropy of the source to something less than X.

Let me first say: This is impressive. I think it offers a very plausible theory for the effects of neutrality specified in my operationalization, namely, distinctness and diversity. Given your theory, here are some things I believe you would agree to:

(1) Decreasing entropy = Increasing predictability.
(2) Increasing predictability = Increasing coloration.
(3) Increasing coloration = Decreasing neutrality.
.....Therefore:
(4) Decreasing entropy = Decreasing neutrality.
.....And also:
(5) Preservation of entropy = Preservation of neutrality.

Is this correct?

Cbw, my interpretation of Bryon's posts has been that he wants to find common ground on neutrality among all audiophiles and all systems, not just within each individual's own system. Please correct me, Bryon, if I am wrong, but I don't think I have been the only one putting that interpretation on the original post! By the way, Cbw, that is a fascinating discussion of entropy in your last post.

Dgarretson has some interesting additions, as well, though much of it I either don't understand or would disagree with. For instance, when you say that "continuousness" is "consistency of musical expression throughout the frequency range." Not sure what you mean by this. My first reaction on reading it is to say that no acoustic instrument (including the voice) has consistency of "expression" (assuming you mean things like timbre? volume?) throughout it's full range. If they were made to sound as if they did, it seems to me this would be a violation of what you guys are calling "neutrality?"

I am also not certain that your concept of "organization" is not another form of "coloration," since you are speaking of "small corrections to pitch and timbre, improved transients and decay against a quieter background." Corrections from what, exactly?

While I would agree with you that "warm" and "analytical" are not mutually exclusive, I would strongly disagree with the notion that there is no such thing as too much resolution. Just one example. Almost all orchestral recordings made today are done with too many microphones set up, in the musician's opinions, far too close to our instruments. The vast majority of the mix uses these mikes instead of any placed overhead, and many engineers don't even put any out in the hall anymore. The resulting sound of the recording is nothing like what a concertgoer actually hears, no matter where they are seated in the hall.

I realize that you are speaking of the resolution of the system, but many high end systems I have heard create a very similar effect on a recording that was done well. And whether this bothers someone or not would be down to their personal preference as well (so is the statement that the recording was "done well," for that matter). This has been discussed in a different thread before, the idea that many audiophiles assume that some "colorations" they are hearing are caused by their system, when in fact they are on the recording itself. I have seen more than one situation where two people could not agree on which was the case ("Well in MY system, it doesn't sound like that!" etc). This is yet another reason why I don't think there could ever be much agreement on any two people's sense of "neutrality." There are far too many subjective variables, no matter how well we could define colorations on the page.