The source and its various meanings as related to the LSA:
1. The live acoustic performance. The LSA, and no preamp, has anything to do with this. That event cannot truly be reproduced and perhaps the biggest drop off from the source in this sense occurs in the recording process itself and affected by colorations/distortions/mixing etc caused by the microphone chosen, the electronics, as well as the manufacturing process of the medium that we do bring home. This is the truest "source" - the "absolute" sound?, but preamps (and systems) do not touch it since it is mediated and never really comes home with us.
2. The recording and the information embedded in the medium - digital or analog. This is the limit of the musical information that can possibly make its way through our gear to our speakers to our ears. This contains all the musical information that is possible - including the ever popular audiophile attributes of soundstaging, dynamics, warmth, bandwidth and bloom. Any musical information you hear that is not inherently in the recording as embedded in media is a distortion and no part of the source as defined here. Pleasant though these distortion might or might not be, they are pixie dust that has been spread over the music and no part of the original performance mediated through the recording process - whatever they are, they are not part of the musical source. The LSA only touches this source to the extent that the 3rd-sense of source does not interfere.
3. Finally, the electrical signal coming from the TT or CD/DAC that has been processed from the recording embedded in a medium to an analog signal for use by a preamp or LSA. I think that this is the source that the LSA is true to. It is the only source that meets the LSA one-to-one. The LSA cannot improve upon either recordings or "players" and a bad recording, or a weak turntable/CD/DAC will reveal themselves through the LSA - in fact a poor recording or player might in fact sound better with a preamp less true to the "source" in this sense. The question if this is true of the LSA, that it is true to the source in this sense, is that what one wants, or should want, in a preamp/volume control - is there a right answer?
CAVEAT: The LSA, will not be true to the source if it has insufficient gain from the source or sensitivity in an amp, or if the output impedance of the source and the input impedance of the amp are not appropriate, or if long interconnects have so much overall capacitance as to alter the frequency spectrum of the signal sent to the amp.
Now, just because the LSA may (subject to debate)may be as true to the source as a line stage / volume control can be, that does not mean that everyone would prefer it to something less true - not sure the answer to that can be decided by measurement and engineering, only listening and drawing our own conclusions about what we like.
