How do you judge your system's neutrality?

If one were to wear yellow glasses while skiing during an overcast day, visual improvement in the snow's light and dark shadow detail would be apparent. Those same glasses on a bright day would not be beneficial...
The improvements in your system may have actually increased the level of contrast above and beyond the original instruments of the musician.

Here, Hamburg is challenging the idea that items (1) and (2) are indices of neutrality. I thought this to be one of the more effective and relevant challenges to my original post, but no one seemed to run with it.

I think he has a point, and that point raises an existential question.

Let's look at the continuum of neutrality as defined in this thread:

At one end of the spectrum, you have a system that plays back, say, a 1kHz tone, no matter what the source. This is the anti-neutral system: everything sounds exactly the same.

At the other end of the spectrum, consider a hypothetical system that processes the source, and through the use of pattern recognition, seeded pseudo-random number generators, and large variety of sampled sounds, effectively replaces the source with something else. One violin might sound like a subway train, another, slightly different violin might sound like a jackhammer, a cello sounds like a babbling brook shifted one octave up and slowed down by 20%. So we satisfy criterion #1: different instruments sound more different. (They just sound nothing like what they really are.)

Similarly, using the same system, we look at the first n bits of any recording (where n is large enough to insure uniqueness over the body of recorded music) and use those bits to seed our random numbers to insure that each recording sounds completely different from all of the others. So now we've satisfied criterion #2 of neutrality: any music collection sounds more diverse.

This absurd system would be, by our operation of the term, more neutral than anything any of us currently has. But I don't think it would lead to improved musical enjoyment. So clearly, within the idea of neutrality we are making assumptions about truthfulness to the source, and consistency of playback.

Which brings me back to Hamburg's point.

If we consider a system that smooths out recording artifacts, we also risk smoothing out sounds that are real features of the music, making the system less truthful (i.e., it suppresses real contrast). In Hamburg's example, the divergence from the truth is the unwarranted exaggeration of contrast. While neutrality, as operationalized here, resists the suppression of contrast, it doesn't appear to resist its exaggeration.

So somewhere in the operation of "neutrality" there is a necessary condition that the playback system maintain truthfulness to some reference point or points. How, exactly, one codes that constraint, I don't know. But if it were coded, would it, in and of itself, be a sufficient condition for neutrality?

Cbw, I think that the scenarios you have cited pinpoint some important points that underly some of the disagreements which have been rampant in this thread.

In my two posts dated 11/20, one of the things that I tried to express, but perhaps didn't as explicitly as I should have, is that if throughout this thread the word "accuracy" had been substituted for the word "neutrality," the amount of controversy and disagreement might have been significantly less.

To me those two terms, in the context of an audio system, mean essentially the same thing. But I'm not sure that they have been interpreted in the same sense by some of the others.

To a first approximation, what goes into the system and what comes out of the system should resemble each other as accurately as possible. Of course, there are then the obvious issues, that have been gone over multiple times in this thread, about not being able to know exactly what is going into the system, about euphonic inaccuracies resulting in sound that is subjectively more pleasing, etc., etc.

But as I see it, those issues, while often being highly significant, are second order effects. And if the word "neutrality" were understood to mean the same thing as "accuracy," which is how I and I believe Bryon and some others have been using the term, I think we would have seen a lesser degree of divergence in the viewpoints of many of the protagonists in this thread.

And by a similar substitution of terms, I believe that the conundrums which you have cleverly posed in your previous thread would be largely reconciled:

Neutrality, as operationalized here, resists the suppression of contrast, it doesn't appear to resist its exaggeration.... So somewhere in the operation of "neutrality" there is a necessary condition that the playback system maintain truthfulness to some reference point or points. How, exactly, one codes that constraint, I don't know. But if it were coded, would it, in and of itself, be a sufficient condition for neutrality?

Substitute the word "accuracy" for "neutrality" in this paragraph, and it seems to that, to the extent that it is practicable to judge accuracy, we resist both the suppression and the exaggeration of contrast.

And if we impose the constraint of truthfulness to some reference point, presumably the listener's prior exposure to live music, while we by no means obtain any certainty of optimal results (either objectively or subjectively), if we interpret "neutrality" in the sense of "accuracy," then I submit that typically there will be a considerable (and useful) degree of correlation, albeit a partial correlation, between the ability of a system to make different records sound different, and the likelihood of obtaining those optimal results.

On another note, happy Thanksgiving to all!

-- Al

Almarg wrote:

...if throughout this thread the word "accuracy" had been substituted for the word "neutrality," the amount of controversy and disagreement might have been significantly less.

Al – I think you are probably correct that, if we were to substitute the term ‘accuracy’ for the term ‘neutrality,’ there would be less disagreement in these discussions. But the cost of that substitution, in my view, is the loss of a small but significant degree of conceptual precision. That is because there are circumstances that an audiophile commonly faces where the concept of ‘neutrality’ does not fully reduce to the concept of ‘accuracy.’

To see this, it is useful to conceptualize accuracy in terms of information, specifically, the information available at the source vs. the information presented at the ear. (I say “at the ear,” rather than “at the speaker,” since the room, and your listening position in it, are ultimately part of the system). If we think of accuracy in terms of information, there are three kinds of deviation from accuracy:

(1) The ADDITION of information.
(2) The SUBTRACTION of information.
(3) The ALTERATION of information.

Examples of each of these might be:

(1) ADDITION: Intermodulation distortion.
(2) SUBTRACTION: Loss of frequency extremes.
(3) ALTERATION: Phase inversion.

My view is that the ADDITION of information is often (perhaps always) a deviation from neutrality. I have used the example of intermodulation distortion throughout this thread, because it seems to me an uncontroversial example of a how the addition of information can be a deviation from neutrality, in the sense of adding COLORATION.

However, the SUBTRACTION of information, while a deviation from ACCURACY, does not always seem to be a deviation from NEUTRALITY. Consider the example of loss of frequency extremes. I don’t think most audiophiles would be inclined to think of a system that failed to present the bottom 30Hz of information as not neutral, in the sense of COLORED, but they might be inclined to think of it as somewhat less accurate than an identical system that did present the bottom 30Hz of information.

To my mind, this illustrates (a) that ‘neutrality’ and ‘accuracy’ are not identical concepts; and (b) that the concept of ‘neutrality’ fails to reduce to the concept of ‘accuracy’ without an undesirable consequence, namely, the diminishment of conceptual precision for situations that audiophiles commonly face.

Cbw723 wrote:

While neutrality, as operationalized here, resists the suppression of contrast, it doesn't appear to resist its exaggeration.

Cbw – I think you are correct that my proposal for the operationalization of ‘neutrality’ is not exhaustive because it would fail to identify as colored (i.e. not neutral) systems that exaggerate contrast. I agree with Al that, if we were to substitute the term ‘accuracy’ for ‘neutrality,’ then maybe my operationalization could be rescued from that criticism. But since I disagree with Al’s substitution, I cannot avail myself of his solution.

As you are of course aware, the hypothetical system you described, while conceptually possible, does not reflect how real audio components are actually designed and built. I understand that your hypothetical system is a thought experiment designed to highlight a theoretical shortcoming in my operationalization of ‘neutrality.’ While I acknowledge the THEORETICAL shortcoming, I wonder whether it is really a PRACTICAL shortcoming. It seems to me that the Rube Goldberg lengths your thought experiment had to go to meet the conditions of my operationalization reflects the fact that this is not likely to be a practical concern for the real world audiophile.

Bryoncunningham, to expand further on your discussion about accuracy and neutrality: The perception of coloration is going to occur mainly in the midrange. This is due to our sensitivity to voices and instruments in the voice range, ie. 200-1000 Hz. And as discussed before, the overtones and undertones add the finishing touches to both the perception of neutrality and accuracy.

You mention the differences of systems missing the sub 30Hz information vs. systems that have it. We can hear those differences everyday comparing either a car stereo or TV to our hifi system. And everyone can notice the "fullness" of sound as I like to call it from our hifi's that is missing from lessor sound reproduction systems. And that is what we pay for in terms of cost and size of both our system and dedicated listening space. The ability to reproduce the entire audio spectrum faithfully requires not only transducers of significant size but also significant power and speed (speed requires power too).

Take for example the ability to reproduce the cannons in T's 1812 overture. I can imagine very few systems exist in homes that can leave one feeling a cannon was just fired in their living rooms. It takes tremendous power to reproduce that impulse of a cannon shot. One, if so inclined to play this song, is likely better off firing a real cannon in their living room at the appropriate times and resigning themselves to replacing a few windows. While this may seem like a shortcut or "giving up" as it were, it will avoid a lot of time, money and frustration in trying to build a hifi system that can meet all parameters of music- including cannon fire. Maybe for the sake of our neighbors and windows, save the real cannon fire for special occasions.

Fortunately, most of us audiophiles mature past playing the 1812 overture (I did so by my mid-20's) and move on to the more pragmatic issues of building a satisfying hifi system that lets us put aside all the technical hurdles in our minds and just enjoy the music.