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

I thank you all for your detailed responses and recommendations, I'm elated that the topic inspired so many responses and expressed “love” for tone controls and the loudness feature.

There were quite a few responses that mentioned room treatment / optimal space design. Truth be told, my system is located in the family room, which is approximately 16’ x 24. Hard wood floors, big couch, recliners, etc. “It is what it is” until I can claim a room within my house to be used solely for the purpose of a listening room.

Sources: I’m either playing vinyl or streaming from Apple via my phone. When I’m streaming, I sometimes connect with a wired connection to take advantage of the lossless quality streaming, or if I’m listening from another room, I connect with Bluetooth via a Audioengine B1 adapter. The sound quality is pretty good from the Apple device, and I have started using some of the built in EQ functions that are present through the music settings.

I’ve found that the issues I’m experiencing are most noticeable when playing vinyl. Based on quite a few recommendations, I may purchase the Schiit Loki Mini, and install it between the turntable and the integrated amplifier and see if the results are favorable.

Lot’s of room for improvement.

Thank you everyone!
Rene

This is where high end does not deliver sometines.

I believe it may have been deliberate. Yes, the loudness and tone controls us older folks used in the 70s were crappy circuits with crappy parts. So throw the baby out with the bathwater? Really the beginning of the sham that high end audio has largely become today.

In comes high end marketing. Knowing that few had the knowledge, skills or flexibility to optimize listening/speaker position and acoustics (I agree with a few posts above; if possible those parameters should be optimized before applying equalization or room correction), in comes the marketing nonsense; use expensive wire/coupling/isolation as tone controls or better yet swap out components and speakers in a circular audiophile dance that has made more than one audio manufacturer/distributor/dealer wealthy. Of course, none of that is a cost effective solution, more like polishing a turd.

Like I said earlier, this is the dawn of a new age. Ignore the marketing and high volume e-commerce salesmen (you know who they are, each has at least one full page ad in Stereophile; who do you suppose pays for those?) and use your own ears and brains.

I'm really enjoying my Outlaw 2150 receiver. It has all the right stuff +  bass management feature to boot. Hard to beat for the price as well.

When my equipment had a loudness button, I rarely used it, tone controls a little. Only used the loudness button to show off when I had visitors. Other than that, the sound was much clearer and detailed with it out! Once I found a good parametric equalizer, that was the best for slight adjustments but prefer nothing in the loop for most music.