TONE

I think the difficult part of assessing the ability of your system to accurately reproduce musical tone, as is call it, is that relatively few recordings capture the true sound of the instrument.  I spent many years in the recording business and I know that most recordings are eq'd and heavily processed to achieve the sound that the person paying the bills wants to hear.  So you never really know.  I've always considered starting a thread in which we list some recordings that we believe accurately convey the true sound of musical instruments, but like so many threads, they just turn into arguments and lectures, so I dropped the idea.  All this said, if you're system reproduces the human voice accurately, you have a good shot at having a system with good tonality.  That's how Alan Shaw from Harbeth designs speakers and he's doing pretty well.