Neutral electronics are a farce...

Hopefully this won’t rekindle a nine page debate as occurred several years ago in Bryoncunningham’s neutrality thread that I referenced a few posts back, but I thought it would be appropriate at this point to cite a few excerpts from his original post in that thread:

Your system is becoming more neutral whenever you change a system element (component, cable, room treatment, etc.) and you get the following results:

(1) Individual pieces of music sound more unique.
(2) Your music collection sounds more diverse....

If, after changing a system element, (1) individual pieces of music sound more unique, and (2) your music collection sounds more diverse, then your system is contributing less of its own signature to the music. And less signature means more neutral....

This is only a way of judging the relative neutrality of a system. Judging the absolute neutrality of a system is a philosophical question for another day....

I don’t believe a system’s signature can be reduced to zero. But it doesn’t follow from that that differences in neutrality do not exist....

I’m not suggesting that neutrality is the most important goal in building an audio system, but in my experience, the changes that have resulted in greater neutrality (using the standard above) have also been the changes that resulted in more musical enjoyment.

IMO those are propositions that are essentially self-evident. As I said earlier, it surprised me that his post stimulated nine pages of debate.

The concept of neutrality should be viewed in a manner similar to the concept of perfection, IMO. We can’t achieve perfection, at least in most kinds of endeavors, but it can serve as a useful goal. And in most kinds of endeavors, at least, there are ways in which we can judge whether we are approaching it more closely or not.

Regards,
-- Al

Mikirob,
I also  gravitate towards Dracule1's  perspective of pursuing a natural sound character rather than "neutral" sound,  and for the same reasons he expressed. It seems that generally  SS tends to be described as neutral /accurate and tubes are more often  described as natural /organic. 
Charles, 

Al,
The idea of relative neutrality is as you say, self evident.  As my system has improved over the years,  very subtle incremental musical information is definitely more distinct, the very fine tooth comb analogy. Contrast becomes more stark and apparent with simple system changes. This would suggest less sonic character imposition from the system components  . Absolute neutrality  is different  matter. 
Charles, 

Radio waves do not follow the inverse square law like magnetic fields. If they did we would be unable to talk to astronauts on the moon or to send transmissions out into the galaxy you know SETI and all that. Radio waves don’t attenuate in vacuum of space and the only reason they attenuate in free space of Earth’s atmosphere is because of losses due to absorption and scattering. The reason ELF works is actually because the transmit power is 1M watts and because the preamps on the receive side are extremely sensitive. But getting back to my real point for just a sec, shielding protects the conductor from external EMI/RFI but not from it’s own induced magnetic field. That’s why I said cables and power cords shoot themselves in the foot. End of argument.

^^ Do you really believe that?? Here’s another link from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_propagation
-wherein we find this text, pretty much the same as they teach in school:

In free space, all electromagnetic waves (radio, light, X-rays, etc.) obey the inverse-square law which states that the power density of an electromagnetic wave is proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance from a point source[5]

The math is shown on the Wiki page. If you click on the inverse-square law link above, you will see why this is so.