Audiophiles don't really want NEUTRAL. Audiophiles don't really like NEUTRAL.

I use “Eclipse,” the last track from Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, as a test for echo retrieval. There was a huge amount of echo put on the tom-toms yet the amount actually retrieved by playback systems I have and have evaluated varies considerably. I know there’s a lot going on but I find that the opening tom hits, in particular, are quite revealing.

 

Steve don't keep us in the dark which preamp was it

That sounds like one of the Shindo preamps I heard. Beautiful sound.

 

I'd love to hear some Shindo gear someday...s'posed to be pretty ultimate in the musicality department.

 

Yah Steve, what he said. At 11k$ this preamp must have everything current sourced on the ground side and everything regulated on the high tension side.

 

Neutrality will always be compromised by the number of linking elements in the reproduction chain. Separates immediately give you, traditionally, at least three; source, amp and speakers. Four if you include cabling. I don't buy into the difference cables make up to the £100 or so point (as that's my experience with several in that price range and I've never spent more, so am in no position to say "yea" or "nay"), but they're the fourth in any case. The fifth (but really most important IMO) is the quality of the original recording/mastering.

Thereafter, it's the synergy of the physical components and taking the time to really get that right. I lose count of the number of people who look at What Hi-Fi (UK title), find the five star award or group test winners, then go out and buy them, wondering why, three weeks later, their award winning separates suck when they put them all together. Hey, they won an award!

Symptomatic of modern life, we want it all on a plate ideally minus the legwork. In this hobby, that's a non-starter. It's taken me a good long time to get the sound I want and it's pretty much thanks to landing the amp I did that made the other components gel into the whole.

Is it neutral? Nope, couldn't be. Is it hopelessly coloured? I don't think so, it doesn't make all recordings sound good (which is fine as not all are) and I can tell when something doesn't sound quite right, while vocals, piano and drums (that very slight echo when a drum is struck; blew me away when I heard that coming out the 752s!) can be disarmingly realistic. I'll take that.

 

Yes, it varies quite significantly. I guess it is completely up to personal taste as to which aspects are looked on more favourably than others. Whilst the ideal system would be perfect for all the criteria you mentioned, Steve, I suspect that some items may be somewhat mutually exclusive.

 

Ive spent hours doing this back when I still had my parametric EQ. It was a wonderful teaching tool to be able to not only spot, but realize how high a peak was in decibels and how wide a peak or depression was, by changing the EQ paramaters slowly as I used pink noise. Varying the bandwidth was very time consuming to get right. But after a ton of tinkering, id hit the bypass and Magic, it sounded worse, so I knew it was not all in vain!

I found that the high end was not so much as important as we think as long as its fairly smooth, but what was noticable was the upper bass and low mids. Tiny 2db bumps that were fairly narrow, when eliminated make huge differnces in clarity and smoothness. That little bump say between 500hz and 800hz range affects clarity to a huge degree when there is even a tad too much. It gives that boxy sound that compromises the actual mids.

 

"Audiophiles don't really want NEUTRAL. Audiophiles don't really like NEUTRAL."-Steve Hoffman.

I'd agree for the most part. I always considered "Neutral" to be a scarier word than "Warm". If we are to enjoy the majority of recordings, our listening gear does not need to render a recording as is, I view it as a requirement for professionals. You yourself said you put the Doors LA woman Tape onto a tube playback machine and "warmed that sucker right up", because adding some coloration to the recording made it sound better?

 

It worked for me what you did. The implication I read here is- had you not done that, the unaltered tape would not sound as good on a neutral system and that warmed up source material is more enjoyable on neutral systems.

 

to be clear: when we are saying "neutral" here what we mean is something like "the signal moving down a wire emanating from this or that piece of equipment is as close as possible to the signal moving down the last piece of wire before [the cutting head/the A/D converter, etc., etc.]? Is that correct or not? None of those things actually make sound, just like a piece of tape doesn't actually make sound. So are we saying neutral "sounding" is "the most like what the mixdown engineer heard" or "the most like the original sound source"? I know this has been discussed before but it makes no more sense to me than it ever has.

I listen to music like Zubin Mehta conducting the Schoenberg op. 9 and I listen to music like S.F. Sorrow, and I don't think "neutral" means the same thing in each case.

I'm way more comfortable with "bloom" than "neutral" as a term... If you mean "flat" just say "flat".

p.s. I like mostly flat but I don't like completely flat because then it sounds like electricity, which is what it is, as opposed to music, which is what I like to listen to.

 

Rendering the recording as is, that is what I consider neutral. To me this is seperate and apart from the instrument or voice in the recording being reproduced with qualities akin to real life. If it's a warmish system a thin recording will sound more real, if it's an accurate/neutral system, a warmed up recording will sound more real.

 

Your reasoning is correct. The whole thread is rhetorical. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

 

I dont view the thread as rhetorical, he's basically asking/stating do we or do we not like "neutral" in music listening. I mentioned professionals require it, home music listeners don't need to have it. In the studio evaluating laquers the engineer needs a flat/neutral cartridge- at home we might like a Grado. Could we use a Grado to evaluate in the Studio? I read Ludwig uses one (but I don't think he cuts records anymore does he?)

 

I like the "idea" of neutral in playback equipment. It should be up to the artists/producers/engineers of a recording and the media it is distributed on to make it sound the way they want listeners to hear it. That seems like a proper theoretical ideal, but I realize there are so many variables in the recording and reproduction chain that this is hardly acheivable.

I wonder what kind of system would make the maximum number of recordings sound best to the most listeners? And by listeners, I mean discerning listeners with good taste in audio - sort of the typical audiophile, more or less. I don't know if I fit in with a sort of average or "typicalness" myself for audiophiles, but I have to start with some kind of reasonable assumption, and I assume that I do. The editors at audio magazines claim that with careful listening, an approximate consensus can often be reached between them (several reviewers, that is) about what sounds good or best.

On a related note, I wonder why, if midrange hearing dip is common amongst audio engineers, that the smiley-face EQ is so popular and prevalent? You would think just the opposite might prevail as a matter of compensation. At least I wouldn't have predicted even further boosting of the bass and treble frequencies to be the result of depressed midrange sensitivity. But perhaps it's driven by perceived consumer preference. I have this sort of dip myself in my hearing, and it was interesting to read Steve's comment earlier that not being able to tell much difference betwee different cables is a dead giveaway. That's me, alright. I suppose in a way, I should be grateful that I don't have to fuss over it or spend a lot of money on cables.

 

Interesting discussion of neutrality. Been playing with several permutations and combinations of gear over the last 24 hours and so far the Stax Sigma/404 has been the champion retriever of the drum detail on "Fortunate Son", and indeed was the only phone that could do piano like my fresh memory of a piano in a concert hall.
Neutral reference should always be the sound of live unamplified music, and my two bugbears with most recordings/masterings are the reproduction of vocals and cymbals. Most have had the upper midrange hyped wayyyy up so vocals are too sibilant and cymbals sound more like an aerosol can. I remember well Steve describing mastering another CCR album where he had to judge the balance between the vocals and drums. Whatever the choices he made, his versions of the CCR catalogue remain my reference for cymbal and vocal neutrality, while the latest Concord/Fantasy remasterings were given away as they were far too bright. J Gordon Holt suggested that getting the midrange right was the most important part and all else would follow. Thanks Steve for getting that midrange right!

 

I'll tell you what's really scary: play pink noise off a test LP, and see how well your cartridge is aligned. It's really hard to get stereo pink noise in a nice, flat line. But adjusting VTA and all that stuff is a total pain, even though it's absolutely necessary. I wonder how many people go to the trouble...

 

You are so right. the Grados that get so much praise on this forum and elsewhere sound heinously bright to me at 12khz on up. My '76 vintage Stax SR-5's are 3x as neutral as a choppy sounding pair of modern Grados. My el cheapo Koss titanium 'phones are slightly smileyfaced and have tons of inner detail but do not have the toppy treble of those Grados either.

 

Could it be the combination of your digital front end and that amp, or more likely how that amp reacts to the speaker? I have a pair of smaller Advents that sound good with my 50wpc Marantz solid-state but sound flat out amazing with my 10wpc Stromberg tube amp. It is a certainty that not every speaker will mate well with your amp.

 

But that's the wrong way to engineer. Sure, sometimes I like to "nail it" to see how close I'm getting to goosebumps or tears (if I can get tears, then I'm doing my job correctly) but the fact of the matter is that things like speakers and hearing are more linear at low volume levels. You can hear more when it's not cranked, and you can hear more CORRECTLY. Proof? Play a 1 kHz tone at a reasonably loud volume. Then, while it's playing, quickly turn it down to barely audible. It will raise in pitch! So when things are LOUD you're not hearing it right.

And if there's supposed to be a dip in hearing at 4 kHz, WHERE IS IT??? I HATE 4 kHz.

 

A great phrase that -- "passable recreation of a live event." Listening to a recording I have had that sensation once (and it wasn't at home, with my own stuff, of course ). I want to tell the short story of it because I'm wondering if anyone else had the same reaction.

Right when it came out I went to go see the David Lynch film "Mulholland Drive." There is a scene maybe midway through the movie when the two main female characters escape into a cabaret type of place. A singer (whose real name is Rebekah del Rio, I've just discovered online), comes out and sings "Llorando" (a Spanish version of Roy Orbison's "Crying"), a capella. I vividly remember hearing that song, at that moment, in the theater, and thinking to myself, "This is the greatest recorded sound I have ever heard." But what fascinates me about it now is that in the movie the performance is a recording -- (i.e. it is diagetically a recording as well) -- the singer falls to the ground, and the song goes on. I have to think there was artistic intent there, in the combination of sound and scene. That juxtaposition of my impression and the event on screen has really fixed it in my mind.

I assume many others here have seen the film -- did anybody have the same thought during that scene? I'd really like to know.

 

I don't think that I have any commercial music in my collection that is neutral, meaning that it has not been altererd in EQ or reverb in some way, or compressed or limited to make it seem louder.

My recordings are not true professional grade, but when I come home with music that has no compression, limiting, EQ, or reverb other than what is picked up in the room it sounds odd because I am not used to listening to neutral. So, to me, the ideal of really knowing how to compare commercial music to real live music is hard and often why when we hear a live performance we may not appreicate it as much. It just sounds so different than what we listen to at home most days.

When I am recording I try and listen as much as I can with my cans off and work hard to remember what I was actually hearing in the recording venue so when I get home I have a better frame of reference to judge my work.

There is a slight edge to the music from TaraWinds and the Wind Ensemble of the University of West Georgia that is not smooth like $2,000 ADCs and ribbon mics. It is "reedy" for want of a better word and at 100-105db at 8-10 feet...in your face so to speak. I never listen that loud at home so I am already altering the presentation and miss some of the power of the performance by turning it down to 80+db.

I will not do any altering of the dynamic range or EQ of the performance, but I would love to add just a touch of high quality reverb to the performance. The rooms we record in just do not have the natural reflections that can really enhance a performance. It would not take much...just a touch. Kind of like a tiny dab of whipped cream on a great piece of Pumpkin Pie! It's almost that time again. HMMMMMMMMMM

 

This is partly correct (the when it is loud you are not hearing it right bit), though you are incorrect when you state hearing is more linear at low volumes. It becomes more linear as volume increases, but only to a certain point of course. What you are describing is not linearity in human hearing, but a temporary threshold shift.

The reason you are not hearings things correctly at loud volumes levels is not related to linearity but instead related to the threshold shifting I mentioned. Your ear frequency response curve temporarily shifts when exposed to loud noise / music and the subsequent recovery will take time.

This is also a reason why people think their system sound better at different times. It isn't the system that is changing - it is their hearing. I have it on good authority form a professional audiologist that these threshold shifts have been objectively measured at as much as 15 dB - 20 dB at the test frequencies. It a reason that some audiology tests demand that the patient not be exposed to noise for 24 hours prior to the test being carried out.

A good reason to keep it down, since by keeping the volume below the level at which the threshold shifts, one can perform the mastering task accurately, knowing that the results they get will sound the same the next morning.