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How do you judge your system's neutrality?


Here’s an answer I’ve been kicking around: Your system is becoming more neutral whenever you change a system element (component, cable, room treatment, etc.) and you get the following results:

(1) Individual pieces of music sound more unique.
(2) Your music collection sounds more diverse.

This theory occurred to me one day when I changed amps and noticed that the timbres of instruments were suddenly more distinct from one another. With the old amp, all instruments seemed to have a common harmonic element (the signature of the amp?!). With the new amp, individual instrument timbres sounded more unique and the range of instrument timbres sounded more diverse. I went on to notice that whole songs (and even whole albums) sounded more unique, and that my music collection, taken as a whole, sounded more diverse.

That led me to the following idea: If, after changing a system element, (1) individual pieces of music sound more unique, and (2) your music collection sounds more diverse, then your system is contributing less of its own signature to the music. And less signature means more neutral.

Thoughts?

P.S. This is only a way of judging the relative neutrality of a system. Judging the absolute neutrality of a system is a philosophical question for another day.

P.P.S. I don’t believe a system’s signature can be reduced to zero. But it doesn’t follow from that that differences in neutrality do not exist.

P.P.P.S. I’m not suggesting that neutrality is the most important goal in building an audio system, but in my experience, the changes that have resulted in greater neutrality (using the standard above) have also been the changes that resulted in more musical enjoyment.
bryoncunningham
muralman1
1,527 posts
 
Bryioncunningham Paying for new equipment may be hard. Where I call such a change an easy decision is when the change moves the sound forward along those qualifiers you so adroitly wrote down here. Sometimes, the push forward comes in surprisingly inexpensive ways.

Shadorne was right about a lot of things, the most salient for me being waterfall plots of a lot of new speakers not approaching the ancient Quad 57. I would like to add to a short list that would include the venerable original Apogee Scintilla.
dgarretson
2,612 posts
 
Tolstoy: "Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold."

Similar to Barnard Malamud's Roy Hobbs in the "The Natural", who tried with futility to hit a hectoring dwarf (troll?) in the grandstands with line drives from his Wonderbat.

Unfortunately not a single rational idea may be attributed to Ayn Rand, particularly in view of the acolytes of Objectivism(having nothing to do with Audio) who nearly brought us to a second great depression-- which for some readers continues in this thread.
cbw723
89 posts
 
Dgarretson writes:
It would be particularly interesting to hear from designers of boomy cabinets.

Heh.

Relating to continuousness, movement toward neutrality implies a more organized presentation.

This is an interesting notion. If we consider the source as maximally organized information, then each stage in the audio chain has the potential to disorganize some information. The extent to which we don't corrupt the information determines the organization of the final presentation. So for a system, the greater its neutrality, the lower its entropy.

Thanks, I hadn't really thought about it like that. It helps explain why upstream improvements (i.e., toward the source) often seem to have the biggest impact: the reduction in entropy is carried through more components, maximizing the potential gain across the entire system.
bryoncunningham OP
893 posts
 
Dgarretson wrote:
...movement toward neutrality implies a more organized presentation. The notion of ORGANIZATION is not far removed from Bryon’s notion of distinctness...One aspect of an organized presentation is that dynamics are more precisely expressed through instrument bodies. Absent this natural sense of embodiment, dynamics tend to travel on their own envelop apart from instruments. This seeming dislocation of dynamics from instruments can be a bumpy & disorganized ride. In contrast, with NATURAL EMBODIMENT there is a sense of heightened control and containment of dynamics within the three dimensional boundaries of instruments.

This is a very interesting observation. I have never seen someone point this phenomenon out before, but it is consistent with my own experiences. As things have improved in my own system, I have noticed that dynamics are embodied in instruments rather than being "superimposed" on top of the whole sound field. The result is a more lifelike presentation. It is a very hard thing to describe.

I am not exactly sure how it relates to neutrality, though. I would have been more inclined to think of this change as an improvement imaging or in resolution. Can you say a little more about your view on the link between this phenomenon and neutrality?
cbw723
89 posts
 
Similar to Barnard Malamud's Roy Hobbs in the "The Natural", who tried with futility to hit a hectoring dwarf (troll?) in the grandstands with line drives from his Wonderbat.

Many message boards give you the option to put trolls on ignore. It cuts down the clutter. I think I'll suggest it to the Audiogon folks.
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