I still have no idea what true neutral is, in my quest to find the type of signature I wanted I must have listened to hundreds of combinations of tubes on dozens of amps including high price tag solid state on every headphone I could find.
No one knows what neutral is and I don’t want to go into this silly debate of numbers.
Once I took it slow and compared one to one I got a feeling of how colored an amplifier is and gained a few insights.
Out of a multitude of qualities an amp has, frequency response coloration or lack of is just one part in a great whole. You can EQ an amp/headphone combination to be neutral but then what about: soundstage depth/width/height, low end impact, microdetail, air, speed, imaging etc.
Because of how screwed up this industry is I didn’t know what I was missing even with raved 15K+ setups on head-fi.
Getting back to the neutral question, at the summit of headphone amps, comparing side by side it was plain to see the the Cavalli LG was less coloured than the WA5, Stratus was less coloured than the Cavalli Liquid Glass, the Teton less so than the Stratus, Stellaris less so than the Teton and now going into DIY and playing with components I’ve tuned my amp to be less colored than the Stellaris. Even so I think there are a few enhanced frequencies yet at this level I stopped to care about it, I’ve already chased the 99.9%, I’ll leave the 0.1 for a braver soul. So the DNA Stellaris a super amp is coloured in my opinion but who cares when it sounds as it does, it’s not the neutrality that differentiates the wheat from the chaff but small minded people think that’s the case and ranked amps according to this single parameter leading wanting consumers regardless of budget on a dark path.
There’s something fishy about the flat 20-20khz thing, again, using EQ you can get an LCD-4 to mirror the Utopia and they won’t sound anywhere near the same.
Another point, amp measurements are taken with a dummy resistor, not real headphones that have a frequency based impedance curve. In addition different headphones have different base impedances, this creates a voltage divider and the amp specs change e.g. how much current it can deliver into a specific headphone is different than another, this can lead to subtle frequency emphasis perceived as coloration.
The industry has forgotten some basic formulas and goalposts, audio isn’t really that complicated for headphones yet prices are going up and consumers are less informed on how it works leading the way to snakeoil and biased impressions and reviews from journalists and the vast majority of forums.
