What the *#$@ happened??

Thanks for all the info gentlemen, I appreciate it. And thanks for the detailed explanations redglobe and dougdeacon. I'm going to leave things as they are for now, and spend some more time listening to a variety of recordings that I'm familiar with. I have a feeling that you guys hit the nail on the head.

While I certainly appreciate the length of the explanation of various woods, I d respectfully like to disagree strongly on the underlying premise - that density of the wood is what’s important for the sound. In fact the better sounding woods such as Mpingo wood, maple and spruce, to name a few, are not particularly dense. I could post the table of wood densities but I’ll leave that for the student. It might have been I who mentioned ironwood as I often use that wood as an example of a very dense wood that doesn't do much for the sound, as a form of irony.  Get it?  Of course ebony has a wide usage in musical instruments as well as Mpingo discs and other audiophile products. I used to have an ebony turntable clamp product myself way back when.

Is it better to hear "the truth" and not enjoy it, or to hear something more coloured that you actually enjoy? I will take the latter.

Yeah, let's not get into the woods too far.
Cocobolo, which is rosewood species, and Brazilian rosewood could theoretically work in some applications. There is much more to woods than density. No-one makes guitars or violins from ebony or ironwood, though I heard than some do from African blackwood.
If I wanted to try something different under my table, I would try some rosewood species first and spruce second, for now maple will do.

One cannot improve upon the truth. The magic we are all seeking is locked. The record is a set quantity. There are mountains of magic in the grooves. The closer we come to unlocking that, the greater the enjoyment.

There are many ways to derive 'enjoyable' sounds which are far removed from the magic in the grooves. Anyone can be satisfied with 'enjoyable' sounds. After all, enjoyable is in the eye of the beholder. It can be anywhere on the spectrum of what is available. Sit back and enjoy what you have if that is what you are after.

The original poster has confronted the fact that with vinyl replay the support becomes an integral contributor to the overall result. The better the system that the turntable is in (arm/cartridge/phono stage/ amplification/speakers/room and set-up of all of the above) the more that this will become obvious. The only way to escape this fact is to go back to lesser quality reproduction which masks these effects.

Despite all of the achievement up to this point in vinyl replay we really haven't quantified all of the contributing factors in isolation from each other. It may well be that coming decades may see some breakthroughs that will shed a much brighter light on just what comprises the optimum approach to unlocking the magic in the grooves. I don't think that we are even close yet. I feel that we are still listening to 'enjoyable' distortions which are to a greater or lesser extent showing us a slice of the magic. If it were otherwise, if we were really raising the bar and eliminating the enjoyable distortions then the differing approaches would all sound nearly alike. An accurate compass will take one to a definite place, not 100 different places.

The search for just what is the truth locked in the record groove is simply a learning process and I think that the OP has found out that first hand experimentation is really the only way to learn for oneself. Any amount of reading can be useful but one's own experience is where one finds the limitations of relying upon another person's first hand experience.

In other words there really are in fact no simple answers to the OP's question. As it stands we all have to ask ourselves just how far we wish to chase the truth of these questions.