What Neutral Means in Reviews & Our Discussions? Are We Confusing Tame/Flat For Neutral?
Does tame or flat = neutral? Shouldn’t "neutral" in describing audio sound mean uncolored and accurate to what the artists sounded like to the naked ear at the time of the master recording? Or is neutral, as used in our community, intended to mean a lack of crescendo, or the like?
I realize this may get controversial, so lets be mindful of other’s experiences and insight. I’m going to use Dynaudio as an example. They’re often touted as being amongst the most neutral of speaker lines. Monitor Audio is another example of such reviews. I’ve listened to several middle of the line Dynaudio’s, including many times at my brother’s house, where he has them mated to an EAD Power Master 1000 thru MIT cables. They do sound beautiful, airy, smooth, and even slightly warm to my ear (though the touch of warmth could easily be the MITs and EAD). His common statement supporting how great they are is, the audio recording industry sound engineers prefer them as their monitors. But I’ve read that the reason audio engineers prefer them is because they are smooth and "flat" or "level", enabling the engineers to hear the difference of the nuances which they create as they manipulate sound during the editing process. Apparently lively or musical monitors, many engineers find to be a distractor, with too much information over riding what they want to focus on as they edit the sound.
I’ve enjoyed watching live bands at small venues for over 3 decades. Anything from a pianist, to cover bands, to original artists of anything from rock, blues, jazz, etc. My personal listening preference for home audio is dynamic sound which brings the live event to me ... soundstage, detail, with air, transparency AND depth. I want it all, as close as it can get for each given $. When I’ve listened to Dynaudios, Ive always come away with one feeling ... they’re very nice to listen too; they’re smooth and pleasing, airy ... and tame.
Recently while reading a pro review of the latest Magico S7 (I’ve never heard them), a speaker commonly referenced as amazingly neutral, the reviewer mentioned how, while capable of genuine dynamics, they seem to deliberately supress dynamics to enough of an extent that they favor a more pleasurable easy going listening experience.
That’s what jarred my thought. Does "neutral" mean tame/flat; does it mean accurate without audible peaks in db of one frequency over another, which is not on the recording; or is it something we’ve minced words about and have lost the genuine meaning of in the name of some audio form of political correctness?
As we all hear differently, and as the term neutral begs the question “neutral in relation to what?”, I don’t know that the question can ever be satisfyingly settled. That said, the anecdotal answer that makes most sense to me is that your system is neutral when it is accurate enough that you can hear the characteristics specific to a recording’s engineering, the decisions that the recording engineer made, the room it was recorded in, the equipment it was recorded on, etc. |
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**** What are the characteristics of a speaker that sounds Musical? **** |
@sfcfran, glad you enjoyed my two cents' worth! Actually, there are some speakers that will allow you to hear everything on a recording, good, bad & not so good, without being uber accurate or neutral. Of course, this depends upon everything else in the chain of your audio system. I find the mark of good speakers is those that let you hear a recording as it was intended to be heard. Once reaching that point, one starts paying much more attention to the fine print on album covers and so forth (e.g. sound engineering; mixing; quality of the medium; production; etc.). The only (maybe) unfortunate by-product of this is that one starts replacing some of those less than sterling recordings with better ones. Cheers! |
