You can't recreate a wide variety of instruments with high levels of accuracy when a component ( speakers for example ) introduce a very specific tonal imbalance into the equation. Some instruments may sound relatively natural, but others, due to their tonal balance and harmonic structures possibly being altered, will never sound "right".
As such, a neutral response assures us that our system is running like a computer i.e. "GIGO" ( Garbage In, Garbage Out ). If you have a good recording, you hear what is recorded. If you have a garbage recording, you hear what is recorded. Otherwise, you don't hear what is recorded, but what the system's colourations and distortions have added to the recording. On top of that, you'll hear this same colouration / distortion on every recording that you listen to. While you might like that specific sonic signature, i sincerely doubt that it would be "accurate" in terms of what one would hear at any given recording session or live performance. It might sound "pleasant" or "enjoyable", but accurate would be a long shot.
Having said that, i don't think that the problem of flat frequency response is what you are concerned with Newbee. I think that the approach that your mentioning here is more of an attempt to "band aid" poor mic'ing and recording techniques as used by most engineers and limited bandwidth in the recording chain. This type of system is probably going to sound "warm and smooth", lacking leading edge information and "bite". If we were to view this on a scope, the front of a square wave would show limited rise time with rounded edges. Some would refer to this type of system presentation as "sugar coating", which helps "sweeten" bad recordings. While this can sound very "pleasant", it simply isn't "accurate" to what the music or recording "should" sound like. There's nothing wrong with this, but chances are, a system built like this will work better on specific genres of music and individual recordings than it does universally. If one doesn't listen to a wide variety of musical stylings and is happy with that type of limited presentation, there's nothing wrong with this. Having said that, this is where we get into the divergences between "music lover" and "audiophile". For lack of better terms "audiophiles" want to preserve the music as recorded and "music lovers" want every recording to be "pleasant". Different outlooks with different goals. That's why comparing notes on various components / systems can be so wide-ranging i.e. people are looking and listening from different perspectives.
As a side note, when i recorded "demo's" for a few local bands, i placed mic's nearfield to the instruments and / or amps and then two mics out away from the "stage". Those two "audience" mics were what the main mix consisted of and i could use the individual instrument mics to highlight certain instruments as needed. This gave an overall "natural" presentation as one would hear from being in the audience in the nearfield. At the same time, it allowed us the flexibility to alter / highlight individual parts of the presentation as we saw fit. I was able to retain the "musical presentation" of the group as a whole while still being able to perform technical changes without detracting / distracting from that presentation.
The "funny" thing about this is that after working with a few bands and making recordings like this, several of them came back to compliment me months / years later. After working in "Professional" studios, they were happier with the sonic results that we had achieved recording "on the fly" in the warehouse that i used. Yes, the "Pro Studio" was able to achieve a higher "gloss factor", but the music lacked the proper feel and presentation that the band was all about / wanted to deliver. Most of the differences probably had to do with heavy handed production techniques, phenomenal amounts of compression, poor microphone techniques and being in a non-friendly environment ( affecting the mind-set and performance of the performers ).
All of these were things that i tried to avoid as i knew them to be detrimental to what i and these specific bands were trying to achieve. That is, i wanted to capture the sound of the band, not turn them and the recording into something that they weren't. Using a system that isn't "flat" does much the same thing as what the heavy-handed recording engineers did i.e. added "distortions" to the music and presentation that wasn't really there to begin with. If one likes that given distortion characteristic(s), it is their system and recordings to do with as they please.
As mentioned above though, flat frequency response is only a small portion of what we hear. High levels of linearity in the frequency domain combined with high levels of linearity in the time domain ( transient response ) are what we should be striving for. At the same time, we should be pushing the recording industry to get their act together. While we can build our systems to achieve the first two thirds of the equation, i think that we will always be limited by the quality of the source recordings. That is, so long as "engineers" are doing the recording and "audiophiles / music lovers" have no input into the procedure. Sean
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