Preamps can color sound considerably. Surprising?

Those engineers operating the studio gear are putting that sacred "absolute sound" through miles of wires, pan pots, addled brains, unclean tape heads, unclean bald heads, digital manipulation, badly tuned pianos, and personal tastes just like the home hifi geek. The only way around it is to hire musicians to form a circle around you while you lie on the floor after recently having cleaned your ears. Preamps sound however the designer wanted them to so it's up to you to decide what sonic manipulation you prefer. If you're lucky you can enjoy music...or spoken word...or dump trucks backing up...lucky you.

Absolute neutrality shouldn't be the goal (and is unattainable) Musical enjoyment is what we are after - if you can still recognize the voice of your favorite soprano / tenor, it's all good.

OK, I guess for a “stereo” I agree.

But HiFi sort of had “fidelity” buried in there, so that sort of has the idea of neutrality associated with it.

Every component colors the sound to some extent , depending how you are trying to voice your  system , from tubes, to cables, even front  end phono cartridges, to dacs , every designer of a amplifiers, preamps hav3 their own design philosophy of what they think is correct ,as well as Loudspeakers, You decide exactly what is correct for your Audio system. 

Hard to understand what you are saying without knowing the preamps you listened to.  I have no idea what each designer was trying to accomplish unless I can see their designs.  As a manufacturer, it is not as simple as designing a product that reproduces the original as I don't have any idea how the music was mixed and put together, etc.  I can only interpret either what I like or what I think others may like.  Plus I am limited to parts and can only try to select and combine them in a way to reproduce sound.  To me, just having a circuit board in a component is an issue to begin with.  I don't know who do design a product that is absolute neutral to your ears.

Happy Listening.

Tube preamps color the sound much more than SS preamps. Why do you hear go with a tube preamp and a SS amp? Every time you roll a different tube in a device you get a different sound. The SS device will sound the way it is forever.