Thank you Mrdecibel, you and I seem very much on the same wavelength:
"What I do is, I listen for the " musicianship ", the " playing ", and the " artistry ", of the musicians and performers."
Yes, this is exactly what I do as well, and I seek brands and equipment which let me reach deeply into the heart of the music performance. Doubtless, there is a good amount of hyperreality in all music reproduction systems... But there is also a matter of congruence and incongruence, and one off that additive intermodulative distortion which can mask as phenomenal "speed" or "pace", or treble brilliance when it actually is intermodulation of transients and non-triadic treble, which in turn generate jarring enharmonics.
Such additive effects might be undeniably fun and exciting on inherently pre-processed music, where distortions are already deliberate/intentional part of the source material, but tend to cause musical reproduction to fall apart on more acoustic genres, where any harmonic complexity would be turned into harshness by equipment intermodulation, and most invariably, degrades the soul of the music and fogs the heart of the performer. .
Thus I am looking forward to eventually listening to a production level pair of Element 118 in my own system, and report on this great thread by @WhiteCamaross the degree of its applicability to my much beloved domain of "wierd" and "boring" music, and to my own tone concept.
G.