Neutrality And The Chain Of Command

[erasmus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Planar_head /img/forum/go_quote.gif Tubes have their place... Admittedly, transparency is possible, "liveliness" is possible, in-your-headness is possible, but neutrality is a silly goal. Too many different recording sounds to adjust for all of them. I guess you could achieve neutrality if you built a system around a single album (or perhaps even a single song), and adjust your system for that.

I've gotta agree with this statement. The recording/mastering/genre of music listened to is downplayed on head-fi way too much, especially when passing judgement on equipment.

 

[donunus]

Quote:

Originally Posted by catscratch /img/forum/go_quote.gif This. After you've heard many different types of presentation, and spent many years attending live events, you start to cross-reference the two and hear what sounds closer to live then what doesn't. Still, there are so many colorations added into the sound in the process of mastering that whatever the system adds to it could be a moot point, assuming that the system is a good one in the first place. On a reasonably uncolored high-end system the original character of the recording will come through pretty much all the time. Also, AFAIK, headphones ignore HRTFs, but the psycho-acoustic machinery in our brains is still compensating for them while we're listening to headphones. That means that the same sound out of the same headphones is subject to very different mental processing in different people, and the result is that headphones really do have a subjectively different sound from one listener to the next. So, when it comes to headphones, tonality and the like has to be taken with a grain of salt. Objective truth, in regards to tonality, can only come from people with similar hearing to your own. That's not to say that I subscribe to audio relativism and claim that all music reproduction is a matter of preference, because that's rubbish. There are objective standards for audio reproduction, and disregarding them on the grounds that they are all a matter of preference is dangerous. In the speaker world, this is much easier. Objective measurement is possible and FR measurements are accurate for all listeners. Of course, then you have room interactions, which headpone people don't have to deal with... It does make for some good discussions.

exactly my point of view.

Let me add...
Lots of people just don't understand the difference between headphone and speaker listening. Many think what sounds neutral to one person should be the same to another totally ignoring the fact that headphones ignore the ears hrtf and realism is translated differently to different individuals.

 

[Cool_Torpedo]

IMO neutrality is achievable as far as you can reproduce whatever is into the recording without adding any distortion nor coloration. This doesn't necessarily mean that you're reproducing everything into the recording. Neutrality requires flat frequency response, which is not that difficult on headphones and even less on CDP/DACs and amps, especially SS ones.
Transparency is a different thing. You can have a neutral sounding system which isn't transparent enough to let you hear everything into the recording, may it be for lacking resolution of fine detail, not having a proper spatial information, lacking the dynamic resolution to get dynamic contrasts accurately reproduced, or not being fast enough to portray the attacks, decays and any other time linked information well. You can also spoil transparency by adding information that shouldn't be there, and that isn't creating tonal coloration either, like when you have extended decays for some digital artifacts, or echoes created into your headphones.

IMO neutral systems are very good preserving correct timbre on well recorded acoustic music discs. Were these systems also transparent, then more information would be portrayed correctly. Once you get a lot of things done as they should, the sound becomes natural. I know some folks here dislike this term, but as I see it, it's just a single term to express many different things made right leading to a believable experience of listening to real instruments into a real space.

Some people talk about these things without knowing how real instruments sound live, not having a single experience of an orchestra playing into an auditorium. Then they assume that some things that they hear are "real", but that speaking of electronic or amplified instruments, is kind of speculative since there's not a correlation between the recorded sounds, the reproduced sounds and what they think should be "the sounds".