How do you judge your system's neutrality?

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.

Almarg wrote:

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.

Al - This is a fascinating idea. If I understand you correctly, you are saying two things:

(i) The target of the concept of ‘accuracy’ is the RECORDING, whereas the target of the concept of ‘transparency’ is the MUSICAL EVENT that the recording represents.

(ii) In some cases, sacrificing some accuracy (to the recording) may increase transparency (to the musical event).

Regarding (i), I am in complete agreement. I think your observation about the differences between the respective targets of the concepts of ‘accuracy’ and ‘transparency’ captures both the usage of the terms among audiophiles as well as the underlying metaphors that those terms invoke.

Regarding (ii), I am in agreement, but in a more tentative way. I have actually been giving this topic some thought over the last few days, in the context of mulling over Cbw’s Rube Goldberg machine, viz., an audio system that exaggerates contrasts. Cbw raised it as a possible challenge to my operationalization of ‘neutrality’ presented in the original post, but I’ve been thinking more about whether an audio system that exaggerates certain contrasts, while not being truthful to the recording, might be more truthful to the musical event that the recording represents. Or, to use your observation, the question is whether an audio system that exaggerates certain contrasts might sacrifice some accuracy for the sake of greater transparency.

The sonic characteristic I’ve been thinking about in particular is dynamics. In light of the fact that so much compression is used in music recording, a playback system that exaggerated dynamics swings, while not being strictly truthful to the recording, might be more truthful to the musical event that was recorded (prior to the use of compression). That idea makes complete sense to me.

Yet my agreement with (ii) above is tentative, for two reasons. The first is that there are other sonic characteristics, like timbre, that do not seem like they would benefit from exaggeration. The second is that my technical understanding of how exaggerations in contrast might be achieved is limited. For example, can dynamics really be exaggerated above those of the recording by the kind of equipment available to the consumer? If so, how does the exaggeration of dynamics affect, for example, transient information? If you have other ideas and/or experiences of how sacrificing accuracy can sometimes increase transparency, I would love to hear about them.

Muralman wrote:

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.

I said a few things about this subject in an earlier post on this thread. Here is what I wrote:

It is, of course, impossible to hear a component individually. We can only hear it in the context of a system. Because of this inescapable fact, there is always a potential fallacy when we hear a characteristic of an audio system and then attribute that characteristic to an individual component. A system might sound bright. Is it the speakers? Is it the cd player? Is it an impedance matching issue? If we get this wrong, we’ve made the Fallacy of Division, i.e., the misattribution of a system characteristic to one of the system’s components.

Muralman – I quite agree with you that audio systems are HOLISTIC, in the sense that the system-level characteristics are a result of the complex interaction of all of the system’s components. But it seems to me that our understanding of audio systems is almost always MECHANISTIC, in the sense that we try to reduce system-level characteristics to component-level characteristics. That is, I believe, more of an artifact of our minds than of the audio systems we are trying to understand. Hence I also wrote:

… the attempt to reduce system characteristics to component characteristics is unavoidable. It is fallible. But it is what we have.

Muralman - I believe you are saying that, the more complex a system gets, the more difficult it will be to attribute system-level characteristics to individual components. I agree with this. I do not completely agree, however, with your conclusion:

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.

I don’t have a problem with this idea, in theory. In practice, it has not always been my experience. I can give two examples from assembling my system.

Example #1: The use of Room EQ Wizard software in combination with Meridian Room Correction made a dramatic difference in the quality of bass I was able to achieve in my listening room. This is reflected in a much flatter in-room frequency response below 200Hz, as well as the subjective impression, confirmed by other listeners, that my EQ work significantly improved the timing and transparency of my system. Meridian Room Correction involves intensive real time computation. It is not simple.

Example #2: The addition of a reclocker between my transport and my dac improved my system in at least four areas: (1) increased perceived resolution; (2) better imaging focus; (3) less shrillness in high frequencies; and (4) lower noise floor. The reclocker discards the timing data of a digital audio stream and reclocks the audio data using a high precision clock, thereby reducing jitter. Also, not simple.

Muralman - You mentioned my system in your post, so I assume your comments about the drawbacks of system complexity were triggered by the relative complexity of my system. While I agree that complexity provides more opportunities to get things wrong, I think in some cases, it provides opportunities to correct things that are already going wrong. Having said that, it is probably significant that the two examples I mentioned are both in the digital domain. If you look at my system from the point at which it becomes analog, you will notice that it is quite simple: The preamp is in the same unit as the dac (the Meridian), followed by 1 meter of analog interconnects, followed by a Pass amp of very simple design, followed by 2 meters of speaker cable to the speakers. This reflects my partial agreement with you about the value of simplicity.