How do you judge your system's neutrality?

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? :)

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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.

Hi Bryon - just saw your most recent post. Very interesting. My initial thought, after reading it twice and thinking about it, is that I am not so sure that you don't have your points 5a and 5b (and therefore the following 6a and 6b) backwards. If I may give two examples - first of a real event, as I understand your terms. This could be me playing my horn on a concert hall stage. A virtual event could be someone creating an electronic tone on a synthesizer in a recording studio. Now what is interesting to me about these examples is that the first one would be almost impossible to recreate EXACTLY. Sure, I can play the same note twice and it will sound exactly the same to all but the very most discerning listeners. However, chances are that it isn't actually exactly the same. Whereas in my virtual event example, anyone anywhere using the same synthesizer could theoretically EXACTLY reproduce that sound. This is the biggest advantage of electronic instruments. So it seems to me that this reverses what you state - objectivism would be more appropriate to the second, virtual example than the first, real example. Now I realize you are speaking of recordings, not live events, but if the standard for recording is to reproduce the live event as closely as possible, it is clearly much easier to come close to the "truth" of my second example on a recording than my first, as I understand your use of the term. In the first example, it would be almost impossible to determine, as Cbw asks, how much your system is altering the source material (let alone how the recording altered the live event), whereas with my second example, this would be easier to determine. What do you think? Am I misinterpreting your terms?

Learsfool – Interesting thoughts. As I understand you, you are saying:

(1) An acoustical musical performance is not repeatable, i.e., identical over multiple iterations.
(2) An electronic musical performance is repeatable, i.e., identical over multiple iterations.

I agree with this. From (1) and (2), you conclude that:

(3) An electronic musical performance is more likely to be "truthful" to (i.e. qualitatively resemble) an "original" musical event than an acoustical musical performance is to its "original" event.

I agree with this too, but it does not bear on the claims I made in my last post, because I was not talking about the qualitative resemblance of musical PERFORMANCES, but rather the qualitative resemblance of musical RECORDINGS. You acknowledge this when you say:

Now I realize you are speaking of recordings, not live events, but if the standard for recording is to reproduce the live event as closely as possible, it is clearly much easier to come close to the "truth" of [electronic musical events].

In other words, you are concluding, from (3) above, that:

(4) A RECORDING of an electronic musical event is more likely to be “truthful” to (i.e. qualitatively resemble) an original musical event than a RECORDING of an acoustical musical event is to its original event.

I disagree with this. A recording of an electronic musical event is not inherently more truthful than a recording of an acoustical musical event. However, it may be more difficult to judge the truthfulness of a recording of an electronic musical event, for the reason that we do not have a lifetime of experiences with electronic sounds to compare recordings against, the way we do with voices and acoustical instruments. Hence, recordings of electronic musical events may appear more inherently truthful, because our standards for judging the truthfulness of these recordings are much less exact.

In other words, (4) does not follow from (3), and I believe that (4) is false. I think your reasoning incorrectly collapses the distinction between a REPEATED PERFORMANCE and a RECORDING. Although both can be judged as to their qualitative resemblance to an “original” event, they are of course created differently. A repeated performance is created by instruments (in the case of acoustical music) or devices (in the case of electronic music). A recording is created by a playback system. This obvious fact results in another, somewhat less obvious, fact:

The inherent TRUTHFULNESS of types of music RECORDINGS (acoustical vs. electronic) cannot be validly inferred from the inherent REPEATABILITY of types of music PERFORMANCES.

This is the essence of my reply to the your question. As to your question, first raised by Cbw, about how an audiophile might judge how his system “alters the source material”: First, I believe Cbw was teasing me in good fun by asking that question, because I tried to “sign off” during my last post after contributing at great length, and his question essentially starts the whole conversation over from the beginning, which is funny in a Myth-of-Sisyphus kind of way. Second, I proposed a way for the audiophile to judge how his system “alters the source material” in my original post. That’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time! Perhaps you are asking: How is the audiophile to judge how his system differs from the real events it represents? That is a good question. Perhaps someday, when I recover from this thread, I will create a thread entitled, “How do you judge your system’s transparency?” Because that is essentially the question you are asking. My current answer is: I don’t know.