Quote Originally Posted by walpurgis View Post
The most obvious culprit (?) for adding 'tone and timbre' to the sound, is of course the speakers. All are coloured in one way or another and therefore impart artifacts/distortions.

Yes. Even the largely flawless Quad ESL is guilty of this.
True, worst are small 2 way speakers, regardless of how expensive or fancy they are, as much as 10% harmonic distortion in the bass. Okay so we are least sensitive to distortion in the bass frequencies, even so this will have a bad effect. I have seen people claim that because of this it is not worth worrying about much smaller levels of distortion further back in the chain. That's bollocks.