07-13-08: Stringreen
Your question is rife with crazy making. I have discovered that the balancing act of using a bright component with a rolled off contrasting component introduces additional problems to the system.
Boy, you got that right! A couple months ago I got a Cambridge Audio 640P phono section. This is pretty linear, but on the fast and detailed side. The specs rate the RIAA curve accuracy out to 50KHz. Anyway, I tried feeding it to a Hafler Series 915 JFET class A line stage that was reputedly "designed to sound like a tube stage" and the result was just weird.
The speed and detail of the 640P somehow got turned into a sort of tubby, rubbery presentation, and I didn't get the full potential out of the 640P until I fed it into a similarly fast, linear, wideband line stage.