Questions for specialists on “warmth”

Warmth in my opinion is when you have the upper and lower mid's to blend a bit better with a type of harmonic distortion that is pleasing to the ear, vs. the excessive overly accurate and piercing sound, or overly defining something like a womens voice, guitar, etc...with a more smooth and spread out sound. Basically the way I see it is if you hear a little warm and fuzzy in the middle making it less direct at you, its kinda like it spreads it out and has a more faded roll off with a unique fatter or deeper kinda echo quality.
How do you get there? Not sure, but so far the only way I have kept pretty explosive dynamics, with a good solid touch of warmth and not going to far one way or the other is with:
1-Paper drivers to handle the mids..

2-Tubes in most cases have the ability to help and tube rolling can find this character if you try.

3-Pretty high efficiency just so its not too warm and dynamics don't get lost easily.

4-mostly copper based cables with the occasional silver coating, but you gotta experiment.

5-very strong power supplys which is why I pretty much went with a good tubey sounding preamp and neutral solid state amps.

....Most other variations of equipment have been tuffer to achieve such results for me. And yes in a way Vinyl is far easier to reach this magical "warmth" By default, but digital can do it, it just takes a pretty good D/A conversion of the right type to make it happen.
This is not the end all be all, but just my results after years of looking for the most musical simple sound that has dynamic definition, but still pleasing with warmth.

Your humour in your thread made me burst into laughter for a while. Anyway...

I was quite mixed up with adjectives/hifi jargons used in description as well but got that sorted out now.

cold=bright=harsh
revealing=neutral
warm=*can't think of any synonyms at the moment*

I can't describe as well as others but would categorize 'warmth' in an audio context as a sound that lacks treble energy.

Here is something I've been thinking about. Can the perception of warmth be less of a matter of frequency bending and more of the rise and decay of the electronic's.

I think a lot of equipment, especially SS stuff, is so fast, especially in damping that a lot of the natural decaying sounds are cut off prematurely and this contributes to a 'cold clinical sound' vs a tube unit which has slightly slower rise and decay time. This would also go to the issue some raise of 'resolution', 'what is too much'. Again, nothing to do with frequency so much as the naturalness of decay.

Just food for thought........

If you have a preamp with tone controls and turned the treble counterclockwise you could hear a warmer sound but most audiophiles know that this extra circuitry will degrade the sound to some degree and there will be some loss of transparency & fine detail, few exceptions do exist. You can still have a combination of warmth, transparency, and fine detail with high quality preamps/power amps without equalization and is accomplished in other ways. A component that sounds bright or warm has little to do with its overall sound quality, matching of components is critical here.

The final sound of any given component of course is engineered into the product by the mfg so that when matched with their line of components the desired outcome is achieved otherwise it is hit or miss. That is precisely why many quality components are designed by ear. When you buy a component you are agreeing that they, the manufacturer knows how to produce a product that sounds good to you whether it sounds bright or warm.

I was told by an electronic tech that he could change the sound of any preamp or power amp by swapping out resistors. Aside from a warm sound & resistors, the sound you hear with any component has just as much to do with other parts and their implementation. Although varying degree of quality in resistors do have a substantial impact on sound.

Some audiophiles prefer a more extended, revealing sound while others prefer a warmer sound. That is exactly why we have an amp/preamp game. I have had a combination of components in my system that produced a warm sound, got tired of that and went back to a more extended, revealing sound.

Newbee that does make sense, its cut short adding barriers that you hear as anylitical.. Something that sounds warmer seems to let notes decay with a slightly fuzzier tone or something, its not so cut and dry sounding, or very plastic. And then a lot of it comes down to the recording itself.