contradictory communication

The thing is, anything can add or subtract from the musical content of a recording making it sound warm or lean(components, cables, speakers and even some power conditioning.) My idea is for instruments to sound like instruments provided the recording is not so hosed up as to relegate all this to a moot point.
I think warm is a valid term. It just doesn't register the same way with everybody.
As was mentioned above and I totally agree with, harmonic richness can be considered warm if it is over done.
We all sit around and respond to these posts and the more you read the less anything matters in the overall concept. Everyone likes what they like.
You could have the perfect system by every imaginable specification possible and it could stink.
Your room has SO much to do with the ultimate sound. Warmth, leaness, transparency, holographic imaging, etc, etc really mean little until you reference them to some standard. Therein lies the problem, they're no standards.
I have actually heard a few people say Vandersteen speakers sounded lean in their system. Hmmm! Everything is a SYSTEM. It has to be taken as a whole. It to me would be hard to review anything without having some sort of reference system [you] believe in. You can take an amp and throw it into 5 different system and get 5 different opinions because of the way it interfaces with a particular system.
I think it's time to lay semantics to rest and listen to some more music!

Of course these words mean 'something', its just that one has to work hard to ferret out the meaning being applied by each user. No difference between how people apply modifiers to audio or anything else.

There's a big difference. If I put my hand on top of an amp and say, "this amp is warm," you know something--you know its temperature exceeds room temperature, but is not so hot as to be untouchable. But if I describe the sound of that amp as "warm," you really can't be sure at all what I mean. In that case, "warm" isn't anchored to any scale that you can use to narrow down my meaning.

An interesting experiment would be to ask listeners to compare two components (blind, so they aren't influenced by prior information) and decide which one sounds warmer. Then see whether most people agree. Until somebody does that (and no one has, to my knowledge), there's no real evidence that "warm" means anything like the same thing to people.

I believe you have neutrality and transparency confused. I think Onhwy61's definition of transparency is more correct. I've heard good tube gears that obviously rolloff the frequency extremes, but sound more transparent, and thus I "see" the real instruments much better than cheap solidstate gears. And those solidstate gears are probably more neutral as measured from DC-to-daylight.

I definitely believe low distortion is the key to transparency.

Who sais that Warmth is the combo of the lower mids to upper mids???
Warmth is the product of an Enthropy and cannot be described in terms of freequency ranges...
Enthropy is Chaos
Chaos has many many other products and combinations of such all at a given moment or interval of the time.
Therefore neutrality, transparency, brightness, dullness, deepness, lowerance can be all just a product of an Enthropy.

MrTennis, thanks for letting us know who you are. I went to audiophilia.com and read your "Accuracy and Musicality" article to get a better feel for where you're coming from.

I dropped syllogistic logic class nearly 30 years ago (seemed like the logical thing to do at the time), so can't say that I followed it all.

Being somewhat simple-minded (though hopefully not overly narrow-minded), I don't go through nearly as thorough an analysis as you do. My philosophy skills are probably at about an eighth grade level.

I start with the premise that at the present level of technology it's either impossible or impractical to recreate at the listener's ears the exact waveforms that would have been experienced at a live performance (or in the case of heavily processed recordings, at the "virtual performance" the artists intended).

My next premise is that not all departures from absolute waveform fidelity are equally objectionable to the ears. Certain measurably small deviations are are quite objectionable, and certain seemingly large ones aren't.

So my goal would be to recreate (as closely as is practical) the same perception as the listener would have experienced at a live performance (or at the "virtual performance" the artists intended). This calls for an exploration of psychoacoustics as well as acoustics when design trade-offs are made.

An example of mis-directed perfectionist zeal would be the pursuit of vanishingly low levels of total harmonic distortion via the liberal application of negative feedback, which in effect replaces large percentages of low-order harmonic distortion with small percentages of high-order harmonic distortion. This looks good on paper, but psychoacoustically is a step in the wrong direction because the ear finds even very small levels of high order distortion fatiguing.

So to sum up, I'm in favor of focusing on recreating the perception of a live performance rather than on recreating the exact waveforms experienced at the ears of the listener at a live performance.

Duke