Neutral or warm? Which do you prefer?

Smooth, fast, sweet, and clear. If you can check all those boxes you're done...

-RW-

"I have nothing against folks that enjoy a tilted up high frequency response, but I do wish they would stop referring to it as 'neutral' sounding. Neutral gear should sound neither rolled off nor lit up, it should just sound relaxed and natural."

I totally agree but if lots of people are using "neutral" to describe speakers with a tilted up frequency responce than what word are they they using to describe speakers that do the least amount of tonal shifts either up or down?

05-24-13: Rlwainwright
Smooth, fast, sweet, and clear. If you can check all those boxes you're done...

-RW-

Couldn't be more true

I wonder if you will get a different kind of response if you mention the two speakers.

I presume by the two terms "neutral" and "warm" you refer to tonal balance. If that is the case, I prefer a neutral tonal balance that does not emphasis particular frequencies over others. I think this conveys more accurately what is on the recording and what the engineers intended. It also means that the quality of recordings will vary more.

Having written that, in the end, I prefer what sounds most natural and like real voices and instruments. That is usually a neutral system playing very well recorded acoustic music, in my experience. And people may not agree on where the line between neutral and warm lies.

I love a great piano or cello concerto on my small scale system. Listening to Led Zeppelin is another matter and makes it a bit more difficult to define neutral and warm tonal balance. But I love that too.