neutrality vs. realism

Sean what a great post!!!!!!!!! Awesome. I was so impressed by your post I'm going to print it and share it with other audiophiles. You hit so many facts right on the mark. I hear what I like, I feel what is right for me, and others look for something completely different. We must each find what we are looking for, to hear the things we like, and you are totally correct, each person is looking for "their sound". While we are all trying to achieve the same goal, we all take different roads to get there. Thanks for a great post Sean.

What ever you think sounds best. Sometimes when I listen to a great system, I forget where I am and get drawn into the musical moment. This illusion usually occurs when the system does not add any distracting sonic effects. I prefer tubes but good solid state also can do it. Musicality it first but you need to be somwhat neutral but not to the point of being clinical.

I would like to add my 2 cents to this question....

"to reproduce recorded music as neutral as possible or to give the highest possible level of realism?"...

I remember (many yeras ago) visiting Lyric Hi-Fi in NYC. The great Mike Kay demoed the Mark Levinson ML-1 per amp against Audio Research SP 3a-2. The Levinson, to me was more neutral, clean as spit and polish and astonishingly fast!! The ARC, however, sounded (to me) more like the concert I went to two weeks earlier! For me...it was as simple as that!!

Rick

Ok, this thread has not been as interesting or funny as I expected. The essential problem is that stereo doesnt do real life. It's a 2 dimensional medium. So, you can either strive for neutrality, each component adding to or subtracting from the signal as little as possible, and listen to what the recording engineers intended. Or you can play with frequency response to try to make things three dimensional and flesh things out and sound realistic.

I read a review of a preamp a year or two ago that I thought was strange. The reviewer said it sounded different from his reference, but couldnt say which was right. Then he said it sounded different from no preamp, cdp straight into the amp, which would seem to suggest it was not neutral. The he said it sounded more like the real life performance he had just attended than either his reference or no preamp at all.

Some time ago, Carver Corporation marketed a preamp with a "sonic holography" circuit. What was that? Just an equalization from flat, or deviation from neutral, in order to sound more like real life.

A famous guy who quit hi-fi (and who I won't name) said: "Audiophiles don't give a damn about whether their systems sound like real music as long as it pleases them. It was inevitable, though, when the vast majority of music-lovers never hear live, unamplified music to compare their playback with." I think that's the answer to the original query above.

Althouh I dont really care if my system measures flat, so long as it sounds to me like the real life voices of my favorite performers (or the real life sounds of specific instruments), I think I like all of my equipment because it is neutral. I think it sounds like real life because each component is as neutral as it can be and either the recording engineers did a really good job or I seem to somehow fill in the blanks.

That's the only way we can make any progress, if every one has the same goal of neutrality. All of the high-end stuff that doesnt aim for neutrality leads us astray.

"Realism" is unattainable. The recording microphone is in no way as sophisticated as the human ear; something is always lost when a microphone picks up sound. And since our rigs are at the mercy of the source media, the best we can hope for is the most minimal of sound degradation through OUR audio chain. Even if you had the "theoretically realistic" system, you are still going to be subjected to the recording anamolies that will tell you it's a reproduction and not the real thing.

So it now boils down to what our individual tastes prefer - because no two people will hear the same thing. We all have an inherently personal response to live sound: different experiences, physiology and tastes. So if there was no equipment coloration, we would then respond to the recording losses and may or may not like what we hear. That's what neutrality will do.

But if we like what we hear, and even if it's attributed to even-order harmonic distortion, cross-over distortion, cable losses, whatever, then we spends our money and makes our choices. We will never attain the realism we hope for - but oh the fun in trying.