Thank you for your response Sean. Yes, I know you are a music lover; this is not totally academic, but somewhat, in that greater sense.
Interestingly, although you say that you had a hard time with my words, your recognition that tube components clearly excell vis-a-vis SS on spatial characteristics, and that the dimensional simulcrum of the space around and infusing sources, even "fast transients", is not the same thing as the tranient itself, shows that you understood sufficiently. [However, your statement "too slow transient will intrude upon the silence" stills shows that you assume a determitive effect of transient upon silence, assuming that sound determines the quality of silence, as if contrast is required. Question: does silence exist without sound? Of course. Then, if so, then which is actually primary?]
My initial point was that this spatial, existential quality of a stereo is intrinsic towards deeper listening, and that SS's seemingly inherent (up til now...) inability to properly render this simulcrum renders it, in turn, less capable of catalyzing such deeper listening per se. Let me explain with just one example.
One of the fundamental "qualities" of existence, and sounds propogated within existence, is the experience of infinity. Even in the sciences this fact is disclosed by Zeno's paradox: you can always divide 1 into its half, infinitely; the ground of all numbers, and, hence, all mathematics, is infinity. But, because our thinking is dualistic (it must have CONTRAST in order to operate - see the connection to what you said above?) it can not grasp the infinite by cognitive means; it inherently reduces the infinite into the finite for purposes of comparison. (Those who assume that only thinking gives you truth, or truth about sound and silence, then conclude that contrast is needed between sound and silence and, from there, that sound determines the quality of silence). But, we DO experience reality when we are not thinking, such as when we deeply fall into the music. This prior-to-thinking mind - which is silent also, and not coincidentally - experiences deeper nuanced "qualities" of reality, one of them being the experience of the infinite nature of reality, or its lack.
Now, on stereo, SS lacks the simulcrum of projecting an infinite nature to space, or even with the "fast transients" within/amongst space as they dissipate. Sound, as it propogates, infinitely dissipates - in distance (depth) and in decay (energy dissipation back into the ground of silence). So too with space itself: it infinitely extends on all sides. Tube technology is FAR GREATER, DETERMITIVELY GREATER at reproducing this effect at infinite dissipation in sound AND extension in space, but particularly with space itself when sound is absent. SS, on the other hand, does not SUFFICIENTLY offer a simulcrum of these critical aspects of OUR reality: decay is truncated in default to transient energy (your desire above) AND spacial dimension, what limited perception of its exists around sound sources, regresses into depth and then falls off into a void space (which, as I stated previosly, is existentially incongruent because it doesn't exist, ie "blackness" of void is not space, but nothingness, hence the label of "black" conoting non-existence - which doesn't, er, exist...).
With such rendition, what you create is existential incongruency: between void and dimension and finite and infinite (what Harry Pearson keeps running around about in his "continuousness" talks but can never quite get to - maybe someone can direct him here to help him out...). The deep part of the listening mind that is listening-but-not-thinking-in-corresponding-silence picks up on these incongruencies IMMEDIATELY and that perception PREVENTS the mind from proceeding into deeper levels of listening. In other words, the deep part of the mind INFLEXIVELY, not actively with the thinking part of the mind, reacts to the absense of the infinite and this recoil pulls one from deep levels.
There are several other ways in which SS also does not address fundamental, critical aspects of reality - space within the sound itself (dryness of transients such on breath), intra-harmonic complexity within deep fabric of sound (the core harmonic that proceeds after the transient wave front) and how sound waves intra-act with each other as they meet in space, etc. In toto, SS's ommission of these FUNDAMENTAL aspects of the reality - that we all share - are fatal in any comparison to tubes at the pinnacle of performance, and even for many levels of system performace below that.
While one may attempt to focus on "fast transients" as a means of improving the sound's melodic "timing" (yes, it is important, but speed is not the only thing, you know, on that issue...?), thereby delegating the above existential qualities in default to an assumption that doing so will "improve" the lack of those spatial qualities, is, well, misguided - inherently so, existentially so, even logically so.
I will address your fast-ness issue on its own later, but suffice it to say that the silence bewteen the notes is also, er, space - no matter how much you have shortened it by "fast" sound.
