> It is not WHAT is said but HOW it is said!

yeah, but that's different for everyone!  I guess you will 
find that the read-one-book-and-get-it-all approach does 
never work.  If you are serious about "total DSP mastery", 
you need to start with one, then cross-check with others.

Problem with DSP is that it is heavily based on two unfortunately
arcane fields: complex variables and the Fourier transform.
Thus, and depending on where you stand, you probably need to 
allott three to six months to get a grasp of it.  A good place 
to start is 

  * Ken Steiglitz: "A DSP Primer: With Applications to Digital
    Audio and Computer Music," Addison-Wesley, 1996, 314 pp.

and several papers about DSP in the Computer Music Journal by
Julius Smith, David Jaffe and especially the

  * Two-part tutorial on the "Mathematics of signal processing"
    by Andrew Moorer (also in: John Strawn, ed., Digital Audio 
    Signal Processing: An Anthology, Los Altos, CA: W. Kaufmann,
    1985.)

Finally, you will need a good reference text.  That would be 
either the classic "Oppenheim-Schafer": 

  * A. V. Oppenheim and R. W. Schafer, Discrete-Time Signal
    Processing. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989

or the newer

  * Sophocles J. Orfanidis: Introduction to Signal Processing, 
    Prentice Hall. 1995. (798 pp., hardcover, $88)

But check for instance 

  http://shoko.calarts.edu/~glmrboy/musicdsp/dspbooks.html

for other choices.