Neutral electronics are a farce...

Can someone PLEASE round up that post by ELIZABETH!!

Say, didn't Elizabeth use daisy chained interconnects?  One assumes that must have something to do with water hoses or something.  ;-)

Roger paul wrote,

"I don’t need to crack the text books to know that if I push a cup off a table that the next thing it will do is hit the floor."

I don’t need to crack a text book to know the sky is blue, either. But neither statement, while a truism, is relevant in this discussion. We call that a Strawman argument.

Mapman

If you step back and try to see the overall process, it becomes simpler.
The electronics is the only part of the signal path that differs as a medium from the air in the hall at the venue and air in your living room

The live performance literally gets lost in the "electronic" translation.
If you have a circuit stage with a gain of 10  Measuring the "exactness" of the 10.000 v rms out for 1.000 v rms in focuses your attention on the vertical axis. The real crime is how much energy from the 1 khz sine wave has been compromised by the amplifying method. IOW if we look at the horizontal time domain we see more valuable information about the constant nature of the delivery speed. Turntables have wow and flutter references, digital devices have jitter well analog amplifiers also have dynamic timing issues.

To answer your question about how significant is the variation -
It turns out it is almost everything. Here is a statement sure to get people upset but its true.

Ninety percent of the problems with systems that don't sound right can be blamed on the electronics. This is because they are responsible for the destruction of vital cues about where things are located in a performance.

I know the argument about how much distortion speakers have will do more damage and not allow you to even hear a lower amounts of distortion elsewhere in the system. That simply is not true. Here is why:

Take phase errors and crossovers etc. Whatever they do to the signal - it is stable. It is not dynamic. If you had an rc circuit to roll off the highs at 10khz of course it would sound like there are no highs but whatever image you manage to get from it would be stable because it is static IOW the diffusion remains the same. Your soundstage may not fully appear correctly but there would be no dynamic "modulation" of location information to scatter the vectors of sound objects.

Analog amps modulate the velocity of the passing signal enough to cause confusion in the mind of the listener. The amount of modulation needed to diffuse an image is in the parts per billion.

Roger