Is revealing always good?

A revealing, resolving system is superior, however all it takes is one sibilant component or cable to skew the balance and make it harsh sounding. It is possible to have your cake and eat it too, but not inexpensively.

One can certainly add tubes or cables with roll-off to deal with this, but ultimately you are going down the garden path, not improving the overall system.

The best thing is to identify the offending component or cable and replace it.

Typical offenders are active preamps that are too cheap. I have found that active preamps under the $10K mark, particularly solid-state are usually poor and add the most sibilance and compression to systems. This is why I use either a transformer passive linestage or the volume control in my DAC, which is not like a preamp.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Not if its revealing noise and/or distortion.

Otherwise yes. It's hard to argue that a cleaner signal is bad somehow.

Revealing systems which are not forward sounding can and do sound very good on poorer recordings.

If one has a bright and forward biased system, watch out, at louder volumes can and will make one run from the room.

But on the otherhand, even this bright and revealing system playing a better recording will sound pretty fine, it's a matter of balance.

03-18-15: Audioengr

"I have found that active preamps under the... $10K... mark, particularly solid-state are usually poor and add the most sibilance and compression to systems."
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Are you really serious??? That's the most ridiculous statement on audio equipment that I have read in some time. Audioengr,do you mean to tell me that you have actually listened to "every" SS pre/line amp out there? An across the board statement like that has zero valadation...

Active Pre-amps do three things in my estimation

1) control volume
2) Provide inputs and outputs
3) make sources sound a particular way

The first two are required if not provided elsewhere. The third is optional but I find to be most useful when multiple different sounding sources are used in order to bring more uniformity to the sound overall. Whether one likes that sound or not is mostly a subjective judgement I think. I can understand where one might deem most to not add any value in the third regard if bases are covered already otherwise.