That whole absolutism about every sound difference being distortion is just ridiculous ASR garbage.
In real life, the sound is altered at every step of the process. Microphones, they alter the sound. Drugs the recording engineer took, they alter the sound. Whether the mastering engineer rushed it because he hoped to get laid later that night alters the sound, but would you call that distortion?
The bottom line is, the only way you’ll ever hear the singer’s voice as it sounded on the night of the performance is if you were there in the room on the night of the performance. And yet, it would have sounded very different whether you sat in 4C or 28AF.
Therefore, we should consider ourselves lucky enough when a system’s end sound is pleasing to our ears.

