What Neutral Means in Reviews & Our Discussions? Are We Confusing Tame/Flat For Neutral?

Earlier ditto? What planet indeed. Some basics: A live show has actual musicians playing, which has a dynamic quality all its own and we all know that. Filmed ballet doesn’t cut it for me, but live does. My damned 50 years of experience has actually been a valuable thing, and I’ve spent my 10,000+ hours performing, working in studios, and mixing many hundreds of live shows learning something every hour. Recorded music is different so it has to strive for another standard which may or may not work...a preference for live music is great of course and keeps musicians making money, but recordings are what this forum is about unless you plan to hire musicians for home use. You can certainly be inspired by live tonal qualities of instruments, and develop a preference for dynamic gear (I have that preference...horn speakers, etc.), but claiming to know what an absolute "standard" is remains simply opinion.

When I hear someone say a speaker is Neutral I'm expecting it to be balanced. That doesn't mean the drivers will always be tonally accurate to the instruments though. I am more interested in a descriptive term I saw in this thread that some use to describe speakers or amps. The term Musical. What are the characteristics of a speaker that sounds Musical? 

FWIW mattw73, the musicality must exist in the source. Then, if the audio set up is neutral, it should sound 'musical'.

I find the discussion between wolfe_garcia and phusis interesting. IMHO you can optomize live performances and you can optomize audio reproduction in the home but no matter the effort or expenditure you can't create a 'live performance' with audio equipment in your home. I'm not sure if you can really get close. Not even with solo acoustic instruments let alone large groups. Perhaps especially with small groups or solo instruments - my reference for live vs home was Sharon Isbin in a medium sized, purpose built, recital hall playing (obviously) an acoustic guitar. The size of the sound was incredible! Nothing you could ever get at home. Great clarity even with soft notes. One off? 

I am a cognitive psychologist and have spent most of my professional life measuring consumers'/users' perceptions of products. I use advanced psychometric techniques to measure multiple components of perception and correlate each one with various physical measures of products provided by designers and/or engineers. Such an analysis provides design requirements for perceptual experience. It's stimulus/response psychology at a fairly sophisticated level.

I am also an audio enthusiast and find two aspects of perceptual experience pertinent to issues of sound quality. One is that perceptual experience is not a single thing, but a composite of four underlying factors: a) Valence (negative vs positive), b) Potency (delicate vs strong), c) Arousal (relaxing vs stimulating), and d) Novelty (ordinary vs unique).

Another interesting thing is that each component of perception is bipolar. That is, perceptual experience varies between polar opposite extremes. Hence, perceptual neutrality is literally in the middle of the polar extremes, i.e., the zero cross-over point. Hence, perceptual neutrality is, indeed, bland.

It seems to me that a neutral audio system is not perceptually neutral, but one that passes an input signal through to output without changing it qualitatively. Whiule it is possible measure the perception of the sound coming out of an audio system using methods such as those alluded to above, how do you measure the perception of the input? You would have to have people listen to and rate the live performance as well. As statistical comparison of the two sets of data would then tell you if they were the same or not. I have used methods very much like this to compare products to one another, perceptually. One can get very precise data regarding perceived similarities and differences between systems this way. 

The point I wish to make is that it is possible to precisely measure perceptions of multiple stimulus situations and compare them using statistics. The multivariate nature of perception means that the target for any given system will be a profile of perceptual measures that matches that of the stimulus situation one is attempting to reproduce. But, my personal preference might not be a veridical representation of some original stimulus situation. I might like the audio systems sound quality to depart from the original stimulus on one or more of the above perceptual factors. Indeed, only Valence has an obviously negative pole to e avoided. With the other three perceptual factors I am free to gravitate toward either pole even though it might not be an accurate reflection of the original source material. It's sort of like touching up a photograph to accentuate certain visual factors. I don't, personally, have a problem with that. You should just be clear what your goal. 

As we all hear differently, and as the term neutral begs the question “neutral in relation to what?”, I don’t know that the question can ever be satisfyingly settled. 
 

That said, the anecdotal answer that makes most sense to me is that your system is neutral when it is accurate enough that you can hear the characteristics specific to a recording’s engineering, the decisions that the recording engineer made, the room it was recorded in, the equipment it was recorded on, etc.