Tim, I'm sorry if my humour doesn't appeal; however, you are misunderstanding what I'm saying, which I have repeated over and over in numerous posts, particularly on Audiogon.
In spite of what you say, I AM talking about low level distortion. Virtually every system generates it, frequently in spades: put on a "difficult" recording at a volume level where it is getting particularly unpleasant, and put your your ear as close as you dare to one of the tweeters. It should sound like a gawd awful mess: this is SYSTEM GENERATED distortion, not RECORDING distortion. Why I do know this? Because I have used this assessment technique over and over again, and when the system is right that gawd awful mess goes away! Aha, someone says! "Typical metal dome harshness, crappy driver, etc, etc". Wrong, wrong! It is the system telling you that something IN THE SYSTEM is not right ...
And what is wrong I can't tell you. In big capitals, THERE IS NO MAGIC BULLET!! What I did back then, and I repeat again, was to tweak and tweak, over and over again, eliminating every weakness I found or thought might make a difference until that capability was realised in my system. And when it happened for me, it was, to use modern vernacular, a WTF moment! And I repeat, that performance was extremely fragile and ephemeral, I could only capture it for short periods of time, and it drove me nuts for years trying to get a handle on the thing. Many times I could have picked up the whole kit and kaboodle and thrown it into the bin!
My system is not special, I have repeatedly stated that essentially any system can be fine tuned to achieve that performance if one is prepared to put in the effort. Yours, extremely expensive ones, low budget value for money ones. What is required in most part is the mindset saying that it is possible to get there ....
All the tweaks I did and do now have been mentioned over and over again, on forums and websites; far more information is easily accessible now then ever was back then. And whole industries have grown up around supplying solutions in one way or another. So what are the tweaks doing? Eliminating weaknesses in the components and setup. And what are the weaknesses? All the things that have been mentioned over and over again: power supplies, connections, interference from the outside world on the setup, interference of the components with each other, etc, etc.
Couple of last points: you have at least one other member who understands at least some of what I'm talking about, muralman1; and the comments by Marty about the Lamm-Wilson "Travesty" System at CES, contrasting its performance with Steve's version. Obviously Steve has gone to great lengths eliminating and compensating for weaknesses in his setup of those components, so he has gone some or all of the way on that journey that I am talking about.
And finally, the Devialet: one reason it works is because everything is in one box, and you immediately have got rid of a whole lot of weaknesses ...
Frank