Dear audio2design,
unfortunately I do not understand the theory as deep as you. And my knowledge of the english language does not help in this respect:-) So I could not follow in detail about the "pre-ringing". I thought it does or did exist. And I thought it is bad, as it does not occur in natural.
But again what additional I can extract from your very profound answer is my idea that digital music by many in the industry is too much understood as belonging to a computer domain as you wrote:
Unless you know exactly the signal chain that arrived at that signal, you can’t reverse it.
It is so easy to do manipulation, 0s and 1s are exactly build for this, but so hard to understand what this implies. Therefore like in the analog domain there are so many differnent ideas what is best. So many people who defend one idea against the others. Well I keep talking now the same thing over and over :-)