What does 'cold' mean? What does 'warm' mean?


Aside from the 8 year old 'hey go open a window' replies; explain a 'cold' sounding cable? A 'warm' sounding amp?

Moreover: do we all assume these are terms we universally nod our heads to in agreement, whatever they are? 
128x128zufan
Zufan, You are  right! So much for my editing skills.

The first sentence should have read "Cold = decrease.......". 

But the good part of this is I now know at least one person was reading my post. :-)
Cold- analytical, inhuman. Warm- emotional, human.

To state the extreme. Cold is a PA horn speaker and warm is all sound coming from a bass speaker. In hi-fi it's not that extreme but that is the gist of it.
Cold and warm are subjectively attributed to sound but anyway very real experience of perceived sound phenomena....

It is a characterisation of the musical timbre of a specific instrument playing in a specific room from a specific audio system, coming also from a specific recording room, which may be perceived wrongly in two different directions of the spectrum frequencies, because of bad electronical design from the recording gear or/and from the listening gear or from very bad rooms embeddings or from the 2...

But People in general prefer between 2 wrongs the least wrong one or the least agressive one, then in general the warm sound is prefered and associated with heart and body, the cold one with the brain . ... Then warm qualify something more human; cold, something more artificial...

But if the audio system is a good one, turntable or dac, S.S. or tubes; if the audio system is rightfully embedded in the house/room, the rendering of the musical specific timbre of an instrument and his perception will be very good, then relatively neutral, nor warm nor cold, because the timbre is not only, a colored-frequencies phenomenon, it is mainly a time-timing- of many sound aspects-events in a specifically acoustically designed recording and listening rooms...

A good room, a recording one or a listening one, must be the more neutral possible for frequencies perception spectrum then the complex timing of events that constitue timbre will be rightly perceived...


I look at these two terms somewhat differently, or at least use different adjectives to describe them... cold/harsh... warm/smooth, pleasing. At least to me, that is what I hear.