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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

Showing 1 response by audioengr

audioengr
3,282 posts
 
Here is one phenomena that I've experienced:

Preamp in or out of the system - most preamps, except the very best in the world tend to "homogenize" the sound IME, even the ones that I have modded. This causes the turntable, CD player and computer to all sound very similar. Because this is not jitter or frequency response, I believe the difference is added compression. This is the inability of the preamp to reproduce accurately the transient excursions in the music. The preamp has changed the dynamic response.

When the preamp is effectively eliminated, the different sources tend to sound much different from each other.

Also, tracks that previiously were not very interesting to listen to are now compelling.

I believe this is one of the major problems with analog audio equipment.

This is what I call the liveness factor.

Neutrality usually refers to an evenhandedness from top to bottom, which can certainly be changed with frequency response. Hoever, most high-end gear has excellent frequency response, so the explanation for this is likely transient response, not frequency response.
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