Tidal Speakers owners

Holenneck, I think you misidentify my orientation and my experience. As I said repeatedly, measures of frequency response, phase, and dispersion are goals and used. But there is much beyond this and that is where listening comes into play. I have personally experienced designers coming to grips with their prototypes that meet the measurement criteria but fail to sound good

I was primarily reacting to Roysen exaggeration of the word "neutral," as though it had some objective measurement. I don't think most designer seek to "voice" their designs to be something other than realistic and uncolored, but I have never known a designer who didn't go for the best sound within their "price point."

This really is the classic "subjectivist" v. "objectivist" argument once again. There is no resolution to it. I am as are the vast majority of the designers I know, subjectivists who use some measurements when appropriate.

05-02-11: Roysen
Neutral is not subjective. Neutral is no coloration, no distortion and no compression. The degree of neutrality can be measured by comparing the input with the output.

05-05-11: Fiddler
Every component, including speakers, puts it's signature on the sound. The only way one could know if a component is neutral is to listen to that component (without any other components in the system - which is not possible) and compare it against the original, live event...Neutral is subjective - PERIOD!

05-07-11: Tbg
Roysen, I don't accept that neutrality is objective. I find it strange that you use this term, but I unaware of an neutrality meter. What are the measurements of neutrality?

I think there are two separate, but related, issues contained in the comments above...

(1) IS component x neutral?
(2) HOW DO YOU KNOW if component x is neutral?

As far as I can tell, Roysen is using the term "neutrality" to mean the same thing as "accuracy." Hence, for him, neutrality is: The degree of absence of inaccuracies. Inaccuracies are deviations of a component's output from its input. By those definitions, the neutrality of a component is OBJECTIVE. That is to say, there are objective truths about the ways in which a component's output deviates from its input.

But Fiddler and Tbg seem to be asking a different question, namely: HOW DO YOU KNOW the ways in which a component is inaccurate, and hence HOW DO YOU KNOW the extent to which it is neutral? This is a valid question. One possible response is: the various measurements of accuracy, some of which routinely occur in Stereophile. But I believe that that response does not entirely answer the concerns of Subjectivists.

The reason is because it is often difficult to know the ways in which a component is inaccurate. The measurements available to consumers, and even those available to manufacturers, are often not exhaustive. Because of that, the neutrality of a component may be difficult, or even impossible, for the end user to assess. In that sense, our KNOWLEDGE of a component's neutrality is, to some extent, SUBJECTIVE.

Personally, I do believe that some components are more neutral than others. I also believe that there are methods of assessing the neutrality of a component, WITHIN CERTAIN LIMITS. Roysen proposed one method: measurements. I proposed an alternative method in a another thread in which the topic of neutrality was discussed at great length.

Hence, I am an Objectivist. In other words, I believe that there is such a thing as truth. But many truths are elusive, and our knowledge is therefore incomplete. In the context of audio, Subjectivism is valid to the extent that its truths are elusive and our knowledge is incomplete.

Bryon

Bryon,

When I hear/read the world netural, I associate that with something without a character of its own. No matter how we can and can not detect neutrality it can never be subjective. Either it is neutral or its not even if we can't measure it. There is of course a lot of ways to do measurements and the avaiable equipment and methods to measure attributes of the output of a speaker are morer than used by the hifi magazines. So to measure neutrality or to what really is done in practice, to measure one the absence of neutrality is fairly easy. One measurement of anything from frequency response to bandwidth will show deviations from neutral on all speakers.

Neutral is a world not really worthy for audio equipment because there is nothing in the chain from the output of the microphone during the recording to the output of the speakers during playback wich does not have a character of its own which is added to the signal which in the end is output from the speakers. Nothing is neutral in regards to audio playback.

Bryoncunningham, you said on the other thread, " A subjectivist does not believe in objective truth." I cannot speak to other subjectivists, or more accurately those who put an emphasis on listening to make the judgment of whether they like a component, but I do believe in "objective truth."

My career was forty-five years as a researching social scientist. I constantly assessed hypotheses, such as whether states that adopted a policy to cope with a social problem improved the problem. This included whether states with concealed handgun laws had less crime. I would say that is "objective truth."

When it comes to audio, however, I would imagine that it would be very difficult to find agreement as to what objective measures might be used to assess which speaker is better. It is easy to assess frequency response, phase correctness, and dispersion. Perhaps we could even agree about distortion. Were we to then choose the ten best speakers and conduct listening sessions, I doubt that we would have any agreement about which is best. The reason is we are missing too much of what makes a speaker better and don't share opinions about these other attributes, much less having the capability to measure them. For example, in my opinion planar speakers don't imagine worth a damn. How do you measure imaging?

Harkening to my profession, choosing the most neutral, best, etc. speaker is like assessing the quality of public policy making by state legislatures. Fortunately, in audio, all we need to do is listen and buy what we like. Granted that access to listening is greatly reduced thanks to fewer and fewer dealers and more and more different manufacturers, but who is to argue that if someone like speaker X, they are wrong?

I totally agree with your concluding sentence.

Roysen, I am at a loss as to what you are saying in this post. You say, "Nothing is neutral in regards to audio playback." How can the concept "neutral" have any utility, if what you argue is true?"