Theophile, I love your analog set up with the TOL vintage table and modern Soundsmith cart and phono stage. I can only imagine the sound quality they bring. That said, to me, the real wildcard is the Truth preamplifier. Ed Schilling told me that it is a better audio revelation than the Great Horned Heils. And, for the record, the GHH's are the cat's ass, so the Truth must be pretty awesome. Tell us about the TRUTH!
There's almost nothing to tell. The Truth is a no-gain powered switching/ attenuation component. I think that the signal passes through one resistor, one cap an optocoupler attenuator and a buf-03.
I doubt that The Truth has an identifiable sound other than the ability to clear away a fog. Anything that might lead one to point the finger at The Truth, is attributable to the source components. It's signature is no signature. What that means in practice is remarkable clarity which throws the burden of responsibility back on the Source. The Truth adds or subtracts nothing. Lots of components promise that. Few deliver.
I knew that I had a great front-end(GT2000, Voice, Moon 5.3 and the 21 Clearaudio Magix). I knew I had a dynamite pair of true monitor speakers(designed to do just that). What I didn't know until The Truth arrived was just how good the front-end and speakers both were. Now I was able to faithfully transfer the signal from my wonderful front-end to my wonderful speakers and lose nothing in the transfer. What a difference that made.
The Truth's circuit simplicity and novelty mean that the unfulfilled promise of the passive preamp(which The Truth is not) is finally fulfilled but with the benefit of a stable high input impedance and a low output impedance that can easily drive long interconnects.
The sound can be whatever your front-end is capable or incapable of conveying. No interpreting. No adding or subtracting. Use it with a well tuned front-end, or use it to fine tune a front-end. I gives an honest enough, capable enough, sufficiently anonymous rendition, that the changes the fine tuning is providing are rendered unambiguously. It's like being a scientist and having a better microscope or an astronomer and having a better telescope. What was hazy and uncertain before is now rendered without ambiguity. Changes that are unfavourable, move the sound away from the ideal. Changes that are constructive move the sound toward real life sound. There is no mistaking which way a system change has taken things with The Truth in the system.
I actually think that in a lot of systems The Truth would be so swamped by the flaws in the front-end and the inability of the speakers to translate the entirety of what The Truth is capable of, that many who buy The Truth would be in no position to understand what it is truly capable of. In other words The Truth can convey greatness, but it needs greatness to convey all that it is capable of.