How do you judge your system's neutrality?

Almarg wrote:

...if throughout this thread the word "accuracy" had been substituted for the word "neutrality," the amount of controversy and disagreement might have been significantly less.

And I replied:

...the concept of ‘neutrality’ fails to reduce to the concept of ‘accuracy’ without an undesirable consequence, namely, the diminishment of conceptual precision for situations that audiophiles commonly face.

Although I disagreed with Al’s substitution of ‘accuracy’ for ‘neutrality,’ his suggestion stuck with me, because something about it seemed to be essentially correct. This morning I got around to mulling it over, and I came up with a new proposal, one that I believe captures the spirit of Al’s suggestion while also preserving as much conceptual precision as possible. The proposal is:

'Accuracy' is a SECOND-ORDER CONCEPT that includes both 'resolution' and 'neutrality.'

A second-order concept is a concept that subsumes other concepts. In biology, for example, ‘genus’ is a second-order concept relative to the first-order concept ‘species.’ The relation between second-order and first-order concepts in science is analogous to the relation between sets and subsets in mathematics and logic. That is to say, first-order concepts are members of second-order concepts the way that subsets are members of sets.

To say that ‘accuracy’ is a second-order concept, then, is to say that ‘accuracy’ is a concept that includes, as its members, the concepts of ‘resolution’ and ‘neutrality.’ We can add this definition of 'accuracy' to our expanding lexicon on this thread:

RESOLUTION: The amount of information presented by a component or system.

NEUTRALITY: The degree to which a component or system is free from coloration.

TRANSPARENCY: The degree to which a component or system is sonically “invisible.”

And now…

ACCURACY: The degree to which a component or system is both resolving and neutral.

In my last post, I suggested that it is useful to think of a system’s accuracy in terms of information, specifically the information available on the recording vs. the information presented “at the ear.” Under that conceptualization, a system is accurate to the extent that it does not add, subtract, or alter information. My new proposal that ‘accuracy’ is a second-order concept that includes ‘resolution’ and ‘neutrality’ is implicit in the conceptualization of ‘accuracy’ in terms of information, since the diminishment of resolution or neutrality by the addition, subtraction, or alteration of information is NECESSARILY a diminishment of accuracy.

In my last post, I offered an example that I believe illustrated (1) that ‘neutrality’ and ‘accuracy’ are not identical concepts; and (2) that the concept of ‘neutrality’ does not reduce to the concept of ‘accuracy’ without the unwanted diminishment of conceptual precision. Al’s suggestion that we should substitute the word ‘accuracy’ for the word ‘neutrality’ contained an important insight, however, which is that the concepts of ‘neutrality’ and ‘accuracy’ are INTRINSICALLY RELATED. The current proposal is about exactly how they are related. My view is that the concepts of 'resolution' and 'neutrality' are first-order concepts that can be subsumed under the second-order concept of 'accuracy.' In other words, the concepts of 'resolution' and 'neutrality' CONSTITUTE the concept of 'accuracy' in audio. Because of this, the concept of 'accuracy' can be REDUCED TO the concepts of ‘resolution’ and ‘neutrality.’ Or:

‘ACCURACY’ = ‘RESOLUTION’ + ‘NEUTRALITY’

A note on the “reduction” of concepts: A concept A is reducible to a concept B to the extent that B has the same explanatory and predictive power in A’s theoretic domains. Like everything else in life, reduction is imperfect. But like many imperfect things, it is also valuable.

At the heart of Al’s suggestion that we substitute the term ‘accuracy’ for the term ‘neutrality’ is, I believe, the recognition that the use of the two concepts often amounts to the same thing. My new proposal is intended to be a refinement of that important insight.

A few words, by way of footnote, on how this discussion dovetails with earlier ones. In a previous post, I offered the following equation:

EQUATION #1
RESOLUTION + NEUTRALITY = TRANSPARENCY

This was meant to suggest that systems that were both highly resolving and highly neutral would also be highly transparent, NOT that the concept of ‘transparency’ is reducible to the concepts of ‘resolution’ and ‘neutrality.’

In this post, I have proposed that the concept of ‘accuracy’ can be reduced to the concepts of ‘resolution’ and ‘neutrality,’ represented by the equation:

EQUATION #2
‘ACCURACY’ = ‘RESOLUTION’ + ‘NEUTRALITY’

Unlike Equation #1, Equation #2 is a first and foremost a statement about concepts, though it entails that systems that are highly accurate are precisely the same systems that are highly resolving and highly neutral.

As you have probably noticed, resolution and neutrality are equated with TRANSPARENCY in Equation #1, whereas they are equated with ACCURACY in Equation #2. This raises the question: What is the relation between transparency and accuracy? My answer:

EQUATION #3
TRANSPARENCY = ACCURACY

Like Equation #1, Equation #3 is about characteristics of components and systems, NOT about the concepts that represent those characteristics. Equation #3 is meant to suggest that systems that are highly accurate are the same systems that are highly transparent. The concepts of ‘accuracy’ and ‘transparency,’ however, may not be reducible to one another, in light of the fact that they invoke different kinds of understanding and different metaphors. ‘Accuracy’ invokes our understanding of truthfulness (e.g., an accurate description) and perhaps measurement (e.g., an accurate scientific instrument). ‘Transparency’ invokes the metaphor of seeing through a medium (the audio system) to something behind it (the music). For this reason, the concept of ‘accuracy’ and the concept of ‘transparency’ may not be interchangeable, but I believe that those two concepts refer to the very same virtue in an audio system.

Hello Bryon,

I love your read. Since I was impressed with your thoughts on system attributes, I took the liberty to check out your system. There I noticed you have every base covered with laudable name brand audio gear. Positive feedback can be found on each component in your system.

I believe you have spent a lot of time and money building your system. Given that each addition is only as strong as the whole, how do you know the real worth of each element old or new?

Bryon, that all strikes me as brilliantly conceived and brilliantly expressed!

And I agree just about completely.

The one thing I would add concerns the discussion at the end of your post about the relationship between transparency and accuracy. I agree that "accuracy invokes our understanding of truthfulness ..." while "transparency invokes the metaphor of seeing through a medium (the audio system) to something behind it (the music)."

Perhaps that distinction can be further refined if we say that accuracy pertains exclusively to the system (including the room, of course), while transparency must encompass consideration of the source material as well as the system.

A perfectly accurate system, referring to your equation 2, would be one that resolves everything that is fed into it, and reproduces what it resolves with complete neutrality. Another way of saying that is perhaps that what is reproduced at the listener's ears corresponds precisely to what is fed into the system.

Which does not necessarily make that system optimal in terms of transparency. Since the source material will essentially always deviate to some degree and in some manner from being precisely accurate relative to the original event, then it can be expected that some deviation from accuracy in the system may in many cases be complementary to the inaccuracies of the recording (at least subjectively), resulting in a greater transparency into the music than a more precisely accurate system would provide.

Which does not mean that the goals of accuracy and transparency are necessarily inconsistent or in conflict. It simply means, as I see it, that the correlation between them, although substantial, is less than perfect.

Best regards,
-- Al

I need to add something. It has been my experience less is more. My wires can't be more simple. The DAC lacks a filter chip. The preamp is spartan. Every little change proclaims itself loudly, training me to go simple. The end result spotlights the depth of material gathered onto the lowly CD.

Thus my question. How, with all the layers of components can one know if one component addition or change makes a difference on it's own or is it a lost in complex relationships with the other components.

Muralman - Absolutely agree - less is more. 0.5m IC is much better than 1m IC and every addition takes away from clarity. I keep cables as short as possible and use DACs volume control to avoid using preamp. Some people claim that adding preamp improves sound. It can happen if you have impedance mismatch (driving problems) but extra component in the chain cannot improve anything. This component might add even harmonics that many people like or add a little THD to make sound less sterile but cannot improve clarity. In certain cases we trade one thing for another like getting upsampling DAC (and therefore filtering) to defeat jitter but in general less is more IMHO