How to judge a preamp's sound


I just heard a YouTuber review a preamp. He told the audience that he tried it with many amps, and then went on to offer descriptions about "the" character of the preamp (bass, midrange, and treble, etc.).

My question is, Can someone accurately generalize about "the" sound of preamp across a variety of different amps? Wouldn't the amps be enough of a variable to at least complicate the "character" of a preamp? This is a serious reviewer with many subscribers.
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Showing 1 response by teo_audio

Let’s just call it a complex affair that can reach self interpreted conclusions via many different paths.

And if one had a textbook to explain it all, then it would say much the same, with some routing possibilities given in the text, for reference. Where the one attempting to apply the text is told to have a go at it.

Like driving a car. A thing, or act..which is an in-situ continual correction - that is meandering forward.

If one is trying to set such in stone, that would be fruitless, as it is not universally applicable by any measure.

Everything affects everything so there is no hard set conditionals in any of it.  And, if one makes it to the set conditionals, somehow, the whole thing is individually in parts and in the connected self altering whole (as a unified chain), then we deal with individualism and individual interpretations. 

There most definitely is a lot of hard scientific and engineering and measurement data in all of it, but the self created nature of human hearing as individuals, and the breadth of the variables in hardware and humans... ends up reducing it all to a wine tasting experience.