Steve,
IMHO you are using the very suspicious audio qualifier
natural to define your
neutral and then get a suspicious definition of
neutral.
Although I am prepared to accept on historical aspects that
natural sounding is very often associated to David preferences in WBF I also can't accept its use to define something as being neutral.
Micro I’d imagine the point of suspicion comes just if we try to be absolute about it.
If we take the word absolute and add it in front of neutral, natural or transparent and apply it in an across the board system context (including recordings and room) then these things can be essentially the same, ie an absolutely transparent system (aka unobtainium) can also be an absolutely neutral one and also an absolutely natural one.
But since there is no established absolute in these criteria we are always left with modifiers like essentially neutral, relatively transparent and sounding very natural.
I get what Steve is getting at with seeing symbiotic correlation between natural and neutrality but then when these are not absolutes they also then have a degree of differences in values and meanings... so it makes a lot of sense if we had a natural sounding source and then followed this with an essentially neutral range of components then we’d perhaps more likely end up with an essentially natural sounding system (ideally/maybe/hopefully depending on the room and how good the recordings are).
I (like many others here) use the sense of natural as a primary aim when changing the system as a basic compass for pointing the system more in the direction where ideally a concert grand sounds more like a concert grand (got in the ballpark for the first time with the Maggie 20.7s), a cello sounds essentially very much like cello (was easier on the Harbeth 40.2s) and a drum kit sounds (and feels) more like a drum kit (the pap horns lead me more towards this but clearly still not sufficiently there yet... probably have more of a shot at it after I build some OB subs).
For me the greatest value in a sense of things sounding more natural is that there is just much less work for the brain to process and identify what we are listening to. The more we have to synthesise a perception to connect it with the natural sound the harder our brains will have to work... so I’d bring flow in here also. If a system portrays sounds in very natural and quite transparent and sometimes almost real ways we can then just go with the flow of the music rather than spending a lot of energy translating what we hear into a more familiar real world context.
I’d suggest to be effective all these things don’t actually need to be absolutes, they just need to be essentially the fundamental perceived qualities of the system. There is a tipping point where the quality becomes an essential perception even if it can still become even more so. This is the problem for me with reviewing essentially on sonic parameters in change. If the sound of a change makes you happier then more so with the repeat of that change and the addiction to that change sets in and you end up with multiples of the same tweak and be it active or passive platforms, footers, dampeners or whatever if the more of the same is always viewed as good we eventually end up at imbalance. Natural sounding is the middle ground in all of this and allows us to hang in with the moderation of balance.
So when we get these qualities essentially coming through then a system can sound essentially natural even if not absolutely natural, and for me there isn’t anything at all suspicious that just clearly some systems portray sounds closer as we hear them in real life... simply obviously more natural and by virtue of dualisms therefore less synthetic sounding... and enough so as to be obvious even if not then utterly exact or absolutely and completely indistinguishable from the real.
