While I don't disagree his implementation gives the more coloured Lampi sound, I think all so called neutral like spectral and dCS have their own color. This neutrality recording philosophy, I have never seen it work except at Mike Lavigne's. Mostly it is the color of sterility and lack of decay. The most see through recording retaining realism I have heard is Lampi with 242, and at two of my friends, who both have the analog domain amp, which is very much like the spectral. In fact, it sounds more neutral than the esoteric k01 with clock that one of them owns. And as soon as we shift to the Px25, that neutrality goes away
Neutrality to me, in terms of connotation, isn't necessarily a positive term, but I know what you mean. Transparency to the source is what I was thinking of. No wonder brands with studio background like dCS and Spectral put an emphasis on it. At home, all that counts is enjoyment. As a tool to work with professionally, not so much.
One of the most impressive listening sessions I ever attended included all professional dCS gear from the early days (the ugly slim black units), where a professional open reel deck played music from master tape through a daisy chain of ADC, downsampling DDC, upsampling DDC and finally DAC again, and they switched back and forth between tape source direct to amp and tape deck through four dCS units, converting to high-resolution digital (24/192 PCM if memory serves), downsampling to 16/44, upsampling to 24/192 again, and converting back to analogue. All that was asked of people was to identify which was which.
(The irony, of course, is that
everyone I'm relating this story to believes they would have been able to tell a difference…)
To my mind, these ideals should meet in a SOTA system just as they do, or rather should, in concert. Live music is and remains the benchmark. What use is a system that can't make me experience (and re-experience) what took place in front of the microphones?
As an aside, Christoph and I heard a Spectral/MIT/Shunyata system in Munich in which high-resolution digital was played back by an Aurender server and EMM Labs DAC, speakers were Magico. The sound was rather depressing, needless to say, Christoph blamed it on the Magicos (let's refrain from discussing those, suffice to say I'm not a fan either). That was until the gatekeeper switched inputs on the preamp and put a standard redbook CD into a Spectral SDR-4000SV player. From congested "HiFi" to a sense of "you are there" realism, transparency, air and three-dimensional spaciousness that reminded me of what the whole point of "transparent to the source" is: the source.
Greetings from Switzerland, David.