TONE CONTROLS? Blasphemy forthcoming, but hear me out. Equalizers are to help us adjust to the inconvenient truth that there is more than one recording environment in the world. Let us assume for a moment that you are living your dream and have a perfect system for your listening environment and have optimized that space perfectly.
Now let's believe the old trope that it is critical to reproduce the sound field that the recording engineer strove to present in their recording. How do you even get a clue what that was? How were they listening? Headphones? Sound booth? Backstage at Carnegie Hall? On the field at Yankee Stadium? Just maybe, one size does Not fit all. And it probably does not match your listening room perfectly either.
Once you have reached the Audiophile level and have, to the best of your financial and physical limitations, eliminated everything that might affect the perfect reproduction of the available aural signal, what do you do next?
Maybe, just maybe, tweak it a little so it sounds as close as You think it can, to Your ears, the way it actually would have sounded if you were there, holding a microphone in front of your face.
My personal preference, as a person who likes to enjoy a wide variety of music types, and for both financial and age reasons must accept that my entire retirement portfolio will not buy me listening perfection or new ears, is multi-level. Starting with the last step before listening: Time-delay spatial adjustment with both current or 40-year-old Yamaha DSP processing if and when I choose and Like the result, and a 32-band per channel equalizer which helps if someone joins me or moves something in the room, both applied after electronically optimizing the time delay from each of the six sound channels in my room to my favorite seats to listen from.
Yep, blasphemy! I accept that on very few occasions will I even know what the original truly sounded like from wherever I may have been lucky enough to stand when the recording was made, so I am willing, when I feel it helps, to make it Sound Good to Me. Isn’t that the point?
I Know what it sounded like when I sat on the floor, first row, 15 feet in front of Simon and Garfunkel as they sat on folding chairs in my college gym over 50 years ago, and it takes some adjusting to make the tape someone made of that concert sound like I remember, but I Can make it sound closer to that memory and it really does help re-create the experience. That is the whole point.
The hardware should be utterly transparent, but it also has to interface with the real world of the room it is sitting in. Only a few lucky folk may be able to eliminate this issue, but unless we can rent the group and the hall for the afternoon, all else is an approximation. When I switch from a live performance at Boston Symphony Hall to an organ recital at a cathedral in Cologne, Germany and then to a bootleg jazz recording made in the club down the street from me, I do not want to spend the day or my next six month's Social Security checks to make the adjustment. I see little difference between a careful adjustment in the sound curve to match my room and a careful adjustment in my turntable speed to match the original recording speed of 71.29 rpm on a pre-WW I shellac platter. It may sound “ok” at 78 but it will not sound as close as it can with even the meager system I have.
-------------------------------
I expect that it may happen, but I have yet to read a thread here where several contributors all have the exact same hardware and listening environment. We tweak, we optimize, we trial and swap out, but hopefully we also get to do what is the point of it all - we listen to and enjoy music, based on our personal tastes, and guided by advice from like-minded others. Don't be afraid or ashamed to add a small tweak from a multi-channel quarter-octave equalizer or even a lowly tone control to accommodate that last tiny imperfection in your sound space that stands between the artist you appreciate and your ears.
