Tidal Speakers owners

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?"

the term "neutral sound" is a subjective matter. there is no machine whiich can detect and measure"neutrality in sound".
maybe some audipphiles switch "neutral sound" with clean bright not sweet sound.
some "famous" speakers measure corrctly, but sound terrible. some sound excellent but don't have "perfect" graphs.
arguing about the concept of"neutral sound" is silly- you like the sound or you don't.

Thg,

Neutrality is what we are searching for. Its the ultimate goal. That is why we upgrade. To get sound played back closer in quality to the real thing. But we will never get there. We will never achieve a sound played back in our listening room equl to being present at the actual event. Since we can't the sound will never be truly neutral.