How do you judge your system's neutrality?

Bryon: THE SYSTEM = THE EQUIPMENT + THE ROOM

Exactly, at least in the context in which we have been discussing it. I explicitly made the same point in my post yesterday:

Almarg: 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.

Learsfool: There is also the "flat frequency response" thing we have already discussed in this thread - no concert hall has a flat frequency response - this simply doesn't sound good for the live event, so to try to create it in your system seems pointless (and usually results in a very lifeless/soulless sound, IME).

Ideally the recording should capture the acoustic characteristics of the hall, as they exist at some presumably well chosen location within it. If that recording is then played back on a system that has flat frequency response (and that has good accuracy in other respects) then it will accurately reproduce those hall characteristics, including any deviations from frequency response flatness, as well as ambiance, reverberation, etc.

If a system is truly accurate yet still results in a lifeless/soulless sound, then it seems to me that there is a problem with the recording(s) being listened to. In that case, it seems to me to be perfectly legitimate to introduce some modest degree of inaccuracy into the system, such as non-flat frequency response, to compensate. The price that will be paid is that other recordings which are more accurate and transparent will then no longer be reproduced to their full potential.

That is a classic audiophile conundrum, and each listener must ultimately try to find the balance that is most satisfactory to him or her, between making great recordings sound their best and making average recordings sound as good as possible.

The "lower noise floor" is also a topic of much division among audiophiles - take my brother's Nottingham turntable, a line which is well known for it's "black background." To my ears, the sacrifice made here to attain this is the removal of too much of what some call "low level information," for example a loss of much of the sense of the sound of the actual musical event/space that was recorded. Live music does not exist in a vacuum, even in a very dead recording studio - the sound of the space is an integral part of the music.

It is pretty well established that low level high frequency hiss creates or enhances the subjective perception of space or hall ambiance. I suspect that is what is behind your observation. In the early days of the cd medium (and perhaps still today, to a lesser extent), that was undoubtedly a contributing factor to the frequent complaints of dry sound, lack of ambiance, etc., because the increase in perceived hall ambiance resulting from low level surface noise on lp's often seemed preferable in comparison. (In the early days of cd the problem was often exacerbated by improper dither or lack of dither in the recording process, and of course the a/d converters that were used in the recording process then were inferior to what is available today).

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.

On the specific question of what kinds of system inaccuracies might lead to an increase in perceived dynamic contrasts, I'm not really certain. Perhaps what is referred to as overshoot in the pulse response of an electronic component or speaker, which can somewhat simplistically be considered as being essentially an overemphasis in the treble region. Perhaps (I'm just speculating here) increases in higher-order harmonic distortion can also lead to a similar subjective perception.

In any event, as I indicated in my post last night, I was speaking more generally:

The inaccuracies I was referring to would not necessarily (or even typically) be "exaggerations." They would be either complementary colorations (a simple illustrative example being a frequency response inaccuracy in the system offsetting a complementary inaccuracy in the recording), or they would be inaccuracies in the system which smooth over, obscure, or homogenize inaccuracies in the recording.

And speaking still more generally, I must say that this has evolved into one of the more remarkable threads I've ever seen at Audiogon (in a positive sense). It would seem to be verging on forming a good basis for a master's thesis, if not a doctoral dissertation!

Best regards,
-- Al

Hi Bryon - obviously, the room has a big effect on how the system sounds, I am not arguing this at all, in fact I believe I said this in my post, and I also said that I agreed that room correction systems can make a huge difference. My point was that "changes to the signal in the equipment," even assuming they are only via room correction still do not necessarily result in either more or less "neutrality", "transparency", or "accuracy". I have heard "room correction" in an enthusiastic dealer's showroom that resulted in a very dead, lifeless sound as well -it depends on how it is applied, which depends on who is applying it. Unless I am very much mistaken, it is not possible to remove all of the effects of room nodes and other similar acoustic phenomena, no matter how good the room correction system is. These phenomena are a part of what gives all great concert halls their individual character, for instance.

Sorry for misunderstanding that your EQ comment only applied to room correction, by the way. I was also not speaking specifically of your system, the question was meant as a general one. Many audiophiles do use EQ for many other purposes besides room correction (I do not), as has been mentioned in this thread, with posted links about it, and I was asking your opinion on these uses as well. I would think that almost all of these other uses of EQ would be a violation of your "neutrality" principles, if I understand them correctly (for instance, wanting to make a violin's extreme high register sound less harsh), would they not?

Gee, I was only gone for a week or so and I come back to find this thread still active. But it does seem to have morf'd into something completely different from the original post where in, as I interpreted it, Bryon was informing us that he had discovered by increasing the quality of his components he was hearing far better replications of the recordings he was playing and he could hear differences that had previously lost. No problem there! Most anyone willing to be called an audiophile would agree with that - we've all been there/done that.

Then we argued at great length the meaning(s) of the words 'neutrality', 'transparency', 'resolution', and lastly (thanks to Al) a word, which for me is easier to grasp, 'accurate'. Despite noble attempts, perhaps even Herculean, by Bryon I doubt that any of us really agree on the subtle differences if any (I can tell by deeply gazing into my crystal ball).

Now we have moved on to discussing acceptable synergy, or attempts at synergy, which are consonant with recreating a feeling of being in the presence of live music or in the studio listening to the music over the studio monitors as heard by the recording engineers.

Sort of a fundamental objective of most audiophiles. One group wants to hear a replication of the sounds of live music, the other group wants to hear as closely as possible what is in the pits and grooves. And, I think, we agree that these are for the most part not mutually achievable and most audiophiles make a chose between these goals when setting up or, more likely, enhancing an extant system.

Some folks think you can only get there with tubes. The 'live' group I think.

Some folks think you can only get there thru SS stuff. The fidelity to the recording group I think.

Some folks think you can only get there thru Analog.
Some folks think you can only get there thru HiRes digital. The divergence seems endless. I'm a true heretic. I'm into playing with and fine tuning with tubes! I'm standing in line to be burned at the stake.

Which leads me to ask, assuming that we have discussed adequately all of the philosophical issues, how does the aspiring audiophile utilize anything in this post to help him achieve his goals?

Al, a degree perhaps, but in what. :-)

FWIW, amoungst my failings, please include a total lack of editing skills. Total! :-)

I think Bryon and Almarg addressed most of Learsfool's comments, but I'd like to add something on this point:

To be clear, I am not suggesting that room correction is worthless, indeed these systems can make a big difference; I just wonder - how do you know when it has been corrected? Again, only you can answer that for yourself, and your answer may be very different from any other given audiophile's.

Typically with room correction there is a fair amount of objectivity in the process. You play frequency sweeps through the system and then look at the response curve, with the goal of setting filters to reduce peaks caused by room modes. Some systems do this entirely automatically, though I believe that the manual approach is still better. But I don't think this is the same as setting the system so it sounds good to the individual. It is set to neutralize room modes, and as a byproduct the system sounds better.

This is really not all that different from voicing a system by moving speakers around and looking at the results on a real time analyzer. A properly treated room with well-placed speakers is an attempt to minimize the coloration caused by the room. But a lot of folks have limited options for treatments and speaker placement, and for them, room EQ is a viable alternative for achieving less system coloration.

Almarg wrote:

If a system is truly accurate yet still results in a lifeless/soulless sound, then it seems to me that there is a problem with the recording(s) being listened to. In that case, it seems to me to be perfectly legitimate to introduce some modest degree of inaccuracy into the system, such as non-flat frequency response, to compensate. The price that will be paid is that other recordings which are more accurate and transparent will then no longer be reproduced to their full potential.

I mentioned in an earlier post that it is now possible to provide different EQ for every song in your library. (The capability is a bit crude now, and would be difficult to implement for analog sources, but there are no technological hurdles to this capability.) This is the have your cake and eat it too scenario. You could fix up the recordings that need it, and leave the others alone. One could imagine adding other tools besides just EQ: volume graphing, dynamic range enhancement, etc.

On that same point, this capability appears to be one (less Rube Goldbergesque) way of achieving greater contrast within and among recordings, even to the point of exceeding the contrast in the source. Which would, by the definition given in the OP, increase neutrality. (While also being less accurate, and possibly more or less transparent.)

So, again, do we need to rein in neutrality with some counterinfluence beyond a simple monotonic relationship with contrast? There are a couple of approaches that one would ordinarily use:

1) Instead of a simple linear function, you would add a saturation term. Lets use "N" for neutrality and "C" for contrast. Lower case letters will be constants. We have something like N = a + b*C. But we could add a term to cause neutrality to saturate and even reverse: N = a + b*C - d*C^2 (where "C^2" is C squared). Here, d would be small, so that for small C the linear term dominates, but when we get to larger C, the C^2 term dominates. Thus, for increasing contrast, you get increasing neutrality to a point, then the function rolls over and neutrality starts to decrease.

2) You can leave the function alone, but introduce another function whose behavior is in the opposite direction. Say the parameter in question is X, then you have X = c + d*C, where d is negative. Note that it doesn't have to be C, contrast, but could be some other parameter tied to C. You then adjust the coefficients so that the intersection of the two lines is ideally neutral and ideally X. On one side of that point you want to increase contrast, on the other, you want to decrease contrast (or the related parameter).

The problem with both of these approaches is that you need a reference point of some sort. In #1 you need to know how much contrast is too much. In #2, you need to define ideal neutrality (and ideal X) so you can set your intersection. I confess I don't know how to do that, though I think the answer might be found in knowing what things actually sound like. But that gets back to my earlier question: If one could define that point, would it alone be a sufficient condition for neutrality? And if one can't define the point, how do we know when too much contrast is too much?