From Jez;
" What you describe with the Nelson Jones (did you have the tuner as well?) has been commented upon several times over the years and could well be due to TID/TIM (a largely obsolete term these days and based on the work of Otala and Lohstro) causing a flurry of higher odd order distortion products on leading edges and hence enhancing the sense of attack... it's usually very fatiguing with longer exposure. "

I didn't have the tuner. Your explanation seems entirely likely to identify the cause, and it was designed well before the TIM phase of the 80s.
It also had three coupling capacitors in the signal path, and later everyone went direct coupling.

In general I see nothing wrong with confrontation, but it should be polite, and addressed specifically at the sustaining of an argument, not about the person.

The Ad Hominem interaction is upsetting and a waste of time and energy, but a little adversarial requesting of substantiation is how we progress.

How people know whether or not something is transparent I cannot fathom. They may well hear something which they interpret to be transparent, but it may be just a favourable mellifluousness, which I think so much supposed improvement can be. Sometimes transparent sounds awful, because it is transparent to source.