How do you judge your system's neutrality?

Hello Bryon,

I love your read. Since I was impressed with your thoughts on system attributes, I took the liberty to check out your system. There I noticed you have every base covered with laudable name brand audio gear. Positive feedback can be found on each component in your system.

I believe you have spent a lot of time and money building your system. Given that each addition is only as strong as the whole, how do you know the real worth of each element old or new?

Bryon, that all strikes me as brilliantly conceived and brilliantly expressed!

And I agree just about completely.

The one thing I would add concerns the discussion at the end of your post about the relationship between transparency and accuracy. I agree that "accuracy invokes our understanding of truthfulness ..." while "transparency invokes the metaphor of seeing through a medium (the audio system) to something behind it (the music)."

Perhaps that distinction can be further refined if we say that accuracy pertains exclusively to the system (including the room, of course), while transparency must encompass consideration of the source material as well as the system.

A perfectly accurate system, referring to your equation 2, would be one that resolves everything that is fed into it, and reproduces what it resolves with complete neutrality. Another way of saying that is perhaps that what is reproduced at the listener's ears corresponds precisely to what is fed into the system.

Which does not necessarily make that system optimal in terms of transparency. Since the source material will essentially always deviate to some degree and in some manner from being precisely accurate relative to the original event, then it can be expected that some deviation from accuracy in the system may in many cases be complementary to the inaccuracies of the recording (at least subjectively), resulting in a greater transparency into the music than a more precisely accurate system would provide.

Which does not mean that the goals of accuracy and transparency are necessarily inconsistent or in conflict. It simply means, as I see it, that the correlation between them, although substantial, is less than perfect.

Best regards,
-- Al

I need to add something. It has been my experience less is more. My wires can't be more simple. The DAC lacks a filter chip. The preamp is spartan. Every little change proclaims itself loudly, training me to go simple. The end result spotlights the depth of material gathered onto the lowly CD.

Thus my question. How, with all the layers of components can one know if one component addition or change makes a difference on it's own or is it a lost in complex relationships with the other components.

Muralman - Absolutely agree - less is more. 0.5m IC is much better than 1m IC and every addition takes away from clarity. I keep cables as short as possible and use DACs volume control to avoid using preamp. Some people claim that adding preamp improves sound. It can happen if you have impedance mismatch (driving problems) but extra component in the chain cannot improve anything. This component might add even harmonics that many people like or add a little THD to make sound less sterile but cannot improve clarity. In certain cases we trade one thing for another like getting upsampling DAC (and therefore filtering) to defeat jitter but in general less is more IMHO

Good link Shadorne, thanks.