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
I'm sufficiently out of it that I didn't get Shadorne's clever comment, especially in the light of references earlier in this thread to an unrelated type of blue pill. But a few seconds with Google and this Wikipedia article clarified it for me.

Bryon, thank you for an uncommonly thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating thread, which in my opinion is brought to a neat conclusion in your last post.

Best regards,
-- Al
Bryon, your constructs are interesting, and in conclusion testament that "what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning." Heisenberg
Nice concluding post. It does, however, raise the question of the accessibility of the truth. For instance, how do I know what is the musical event and what is my system? So now I have to come up with a way of determining how much, and in what way, my playback system alters the source material. Any thoughts on that? :)
>

Like Bryon, I took the red one. But that blue one can be oh-so-seductive at times, especially with those recordings that are just a bit overproduced.
ultimately, i think most of us do not listen to music in an analytic mode and are more concerned whether the sound reaching the ears is pleasurable. in that sense, musicality may be more important to most audiophiles.