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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
dgarretson
2,605 posts
 
"Sounding better and sounding neutral are two completely different things."

Assuming that one accepts common usage in critical vocabulary that "neutral" means "uncolored," can you suggest a better term than neutral to describe the experience of "better"?
muralman1
1,527 posts
 
Neutral is the letting the music on the disc to be fully realized.

Better is the listener's subjective notion of how he likes the music colored.

You see this all the time, like when someone starts a thread asking for the, "Smoothest CD player." A lively rock and a lot of jazz discs will not comply - unless smoothed - read dulled.
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,432 posts
 
Dgarretson- you suggest in your question that neutral is a good thing. My Benchmark DAC1 was, in studio test, the most accurate DAC but it was also called sterile, analytic etc. and not picked as a best DAC at the end.

Neutral often means analytic, dry, uninvolving, sterile
Better often means warm, tubey, vinyl etc.

You will find on this forum people who like sound of class D amps including me, Muralman1, Guidocorona and many others but you will also find people who just hate it. Same with critics - many called it horrible but Jeff Rowland switched whole production to class D only.

All opinions expressed on this forum are relative to something. We say "warmer than..." "more resolving than..." etc. because sound is a very subjective matter and absolute terms like "neutral" don't even exist.
kijanki's avatar
kijanki
4,432 posts
 
Muralman1 wrote "Better is the listener's subjective notion of how he likes the music colored."

Vince, you assume listener thinks that his sound is colored. Just ask owner of very warm sounding system (vinyl, tubes, warm speakers) if his system sounds natural (natural sound being effect of neutral system and neutral recording) - I would be very surprised if they'll say that sound is colored.

What is natural sounding to me might be horrible sounding to someone else. Bryon was trying to bring "listening experience" here believing that one can "neutralize" sound he likes by getting more listening experience. I don't think so - just look at my example with critics and class D amps in previous post.
dgarretson
2,605 posts
 
Kijanki, my view is that analytic & sterile err at the opposite extreme of unresolving warmth. Both kinds of extremes are colorations and as such, represent deviations from neutrality. There are many instances in which internal mods to electronics improve resolution while also preserving and even enhancing warmth. A move in this direction is an uncompromising step toward neutrality. Granted there are no absolutes, but as long as a playback system bothers one even a bit with an undesireable coloration, I do not rationalize away the negative coloration as an inevitable compromise. For me the notion of a step toward neutrality is a useful construct to describe resolution of what in the conventional wisdom of audio may appear on the surface to be unreconciliable characteristics. Resolutions of this type may be heard as the system getting out of the way of the music.
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