contradictory communication

Of course these words mean 'something', its just that one has to work hard to ferret out the meaning being applied by each user. No difference between how people apply modifiers to audio or anything else.

There's a big difference. If I put my hand on top of an amp and say, "this amp is warm," you know something--you know its temperature exceeds room temperature, but is not so hot as to be untouchable. But if I describe the sound of that amp as "warm," you really can't be sure at all what I mean. In that case, "warm" isn't anchored to any scale that you can use to narrow down my meaning.

An interesting experiment would be to ask listeners to compare two components (blind, so they aren't influenced by prior information) and decide which one sounds warmer. Then see whether most people agree. Until somebody does that (and no one has, to my knowledge), there's no real evidence that "warm" means anything like the same thing to people.

I believe you have neutrality and transparency confused. I think Onhwy61's definition of transparency is more correct. I've heard good tube gears that obviously rolloff the frequency extremes, but sound more transparent, and thus I "see" the real instruments much better than cheap solidstate gears. And those solidstate gears are probably more neutral as measured from DC-to-daylight.

I definitely believe low distortion is the key to transparency.

Who sais that Warmth is the combo of the lower mids to upper mids???
Warmth is the product of an Enthropy and cannot be described in terms of freequency ranges...
Enthropy is Chaos
Chaos has many many other products and combinations of such all at a given moment or interval of the time.
Therefore neutrality, transparency, brightness, dullness, deepness, lowerance can be all just a product of an Enthropy.

MrTennis, thanks for letting us know who you are. I went to audiophilia.com and read your "Accuracy and Musicality" article to get a better feel for where you're coming from.

I dropped syllogistic logic class nearly 30 years ago (seemed like the logical thing to do at the time), so can't say that I followed it all.

Being somewhat simple-minded (though hopefully not overly narrow-minded), I don't go through nearly as thorough an analysis as you do. My philosophy skills are probably at about an eighth grade level.

I start with the premise that at the present level of technology it's either impossible or impractical to recreate at the listener's ears the exact waveforms that would have been experienced at a live performance (or in the case of heavily processed recordings, at the "virtual performance" the artists intended).

My next premise is that not all departures from absolute waveform fidelity are equally objectionable to the ears. Certain measurably small deviations are are quite objectionable, and certain seemingly large ones aren't.

So my goal would be to recreate (as closely as is practical) the same perception as the listener would have experienced at a live performance (or at the "virtual performance" the artists intended). This calls for an exploration of psychoacoustics as well as acoustics when design trade-offs are made.

An example of mis-directed perfectionist zeal would be the pursuit of vanishingly low levels of total harmonic distortion via the liberal application of negative feedback, which in effect replaces large percentages of low-order harmonic distortion with small percentages of high-order harmonic distortion. This looks good on paper, but psychoacoustically is a step in the wrong direction because the ear finds even very small levels of high order distortion fatiguing.

So to sum up, I'm in favor of focusing on recreating the perception of a live performance rather than on recreating the exact waveforms experienced at the ears of the listener at a live performance.

Duke

The term you folks are reaching for here is "analogy" using warm to describe sound is an analogy; using warm to describe relative temperature is not. To be precise in meaning, the reviewer should state what he or she means when they use that sort of analogy, but that may be asking too much.

And Goatwuss: "Take 2 speaker drivers, one made out of aluminum, the other paper, and the third plastic composite." WTF????

Just busting you, Goatboy! Its been a $hitty week.