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In the Forum: Playback Listening
In the Thread: About the Audio Neutrality.
Post Subject: What is audio neutrality?Posted by drdna on: 3/31/2007
To me, audio neutrality is a very difficult idea to express.  Fundamentally, all audio recording and reproduction is a terribly compromised and flawed system.  An analogy might be to record the sound of children laughing and playing, splashing in the water of a outdoor stream with birds chirping in the background, to record the pitch and amplitude meticulously, and then play it back on a chruch organ.

The goal for every listener I think is to reproduce a connection with certain elements of the original musical event, but which elements will vary from listener to listener.  Likewise, we can manufacture a system of sound reproduction that does reproduce certain elements better than others.

The difficulty arises because these systems are not perfect; they are both additive and subtractive in their distortions of the original source material.  Colloquially, when a system has very little additive distortion, that is to say it mostly has subtractive flaws, it is referred to as "neutral" and the music made tends to be accurate or true to the source in many parameters but sacrifices many other elements, leaving it drained of a bit of musical and emotional juice.

Likewise, when a system has few subtractive flaws and mostly additive distortions, it is referred to as "musical" and when one hears it, it has closer connection to the emotional involvement perhaps but at the cost of added distortions like sibilance, etc.

The true neutral reproduction would be like a direct connection to the original event.  The system would impart no additive or subtractive distortions whatsoever.  This is impossible.  Thus, the listener comes into play.  Evey listener has diffferent focuses in audio reproduction of music.  This is quite true for musicians especially, who are not necessarily better listeners than non-musicians; they are a bit handicapped because they are specifically trained to listen for very specific things when they are practicing and learning.  It is more important to discover the things that are important and the things that are intolerable to you in audio reproduction of music to build your system.

This is important in a discussion of neutrality, because I think when a lot of people describe something as neutral it has a lot of subtractive flaws to my ears.  Thus, I don't enjoy a lot of "neutral" audio systems because they are so empty of music.  To me this kind of "neutral" system is like a comprehensive black-and-white book on the female anatomy, with exact measurements of femur length and diameter of eyebrow hairs, etc.  It is just not as enjoyable to me as seeing a live woman in the room with me, where I can smell her perfume, see her smile, etc. even if it is in a room of 100 meowing cats as an additive distortion.

But that's just me.

Adrian

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