I miss my Loudness Button and Tone Controls....


So I recently upgraded my system to a Rogue Audio Sphinx integrated amplifier, V2.

Prior to this purchase I was using a NAD C162 preamp, and an Emotive UA-200 amplifier.

After a month of listening, I have to say, I miss the tone controls and the loudness feature on the old NAD pre-amp, especially when listening at lower volumes. The Rogue amp sounds great when played at a minimum of 50% of its output, but at lower volumes, it just seems flat. I do use a sub (SVS SB-2000 pro, and I'm using a very efficient speaker (Zu Audio DW's).

I've toyed with the idea of buying an EQ of some sort that has a bypass so that I can boost some of the frequencies when listening at lower volumes, and then bypass when I listening at higher volumes.

Any thoughts on this? Anyone experience anything similar? I'm about to pack and sell the Rogue amp, as the cons outweigh the pros for me.

 

 

barkeyzee1

I had the same issue re tone controls.  I am using an SAE 1800 parametric equalizer.  Hard to find in a good condition..

Toe your speakers in 5 degrees at a time until you reach

the amount of high frequency detail you desire

speaker placement is your tone controls when your components don’t have tone controls

Good luck

Willy-T 

I had the Loki but now use the Akitika PR-102.  It has a lot more features, sounds better, IMHO, and it has a remote.  Costs a little more, but it sounds good and is much more convenient.  Balance in particular is a huge benefit.  The remote covers a lot of the features, including volume, balance, “hush”, turning tone controls on and off, input selector, output selector, and mute.  

You mentioned loudness.  You can set the tone controls as you like for loudness and then turn them on and off with the PR-102 remote.  This is essentially a customizable loudness control.