Removing fancy substitutions

One of the things I (usually) really like about WordPress is the set of filters which convert things like --- to — and " to the appropriate kind of double quotes, etc.

However, is there some clean way to turn it off? As in run none of these transformation rules and leave the text just as I typed it?

(I ask this because I am a long time user of talkr, and it has difficulty parsing some of these characters, ’ for e.g., and I would like to generate an RSS feed for it without these funky symbols. talkr is a fun tool which reads the content of your posts and converts it into audio. Check it out, and see it struggling on these characters by clicking on the speaker icon on a sample web page.)