Can't say I agree with all of that, Frank, but I'm certainly in agreement with quite a bit.
Agreement? Yeah, ribbons and panels do seem to have an advantage in reproducing a transparent high end. Their weaknesses lie elsewhere. And minimizing distortion,
at all frequencies is critical. Even that "not unpleasant" distortion, harmonic, is an enemy here. If you want a crash cymbal to sound anything like the real thing, eliminate as much distortion as you can. You want a kick drum to even present a reasonable facsimile of the kick you get on stage? Don't embrace it because it adds a pleasant warmth somewhere else in the signal.
Disagreement? There is no "real" sound reproduction. Real-ish? Sure. I think what you call "real" is what most of us think of as transparency. We reach for it. It is never quite in our hands. And it depends on a lot of things, though clean treble
is critical. But it has as much to do with noise, flat frequency response, dynamic range (...), as it does with high frequency distortion. The illusion will flee just as readily from a bad signal to noise ratio, a slow response time, a poorly controlled driver, lack of coherence... But the thing I think we
disagree on the most is how to get there. You believe in small electronic tweaks, and I don't doubt that you hear changes with them. I go to the fundamentals: Minimalism, which is impossible in the current "high-end" vision of what constitutes a good system, headroom, accuracy, simplicity and driver control. And, of course, the biggest thing we disagree on is how much any elimination of small distortions in the middle can really do, when the big ones are in the recordings and the transducers.
Your mileage clearly varies as does the mileage of many, many audiophiles with complex, euphonic systems with relatively high levels of noise and distortion. I'm sure we aren't all attracted to the same women either
.
Tim