My sacrilegeous question to audiophiles out there regarding parametric equalizer.

Normally in High-End home system we don't need an EQs, because everything is just great. The shortest signal path is the way to go. However, we change cartridges, tonearms, cables, amps, preamps to find what's the best. 

But for professional application EQ can help to quickly adjust the sound in a certain room such as a bar, club or whatever place where people playing records in public. In such places you need to quickly adjust everything, this is a compromise. Some public places are terrible in terms of room acoustics and the EQing sometimes can help. So in my opinion EQ is for professionals, not for Audiophiles. 

However, i rebember all those Hi-Fi home systems from the 80's with EQ and it was fun to play with it, i've been using EQs when i listeted to cassette tapes as a teenager. 

EQ in Audiophile's home is like too much spices in the good food. 

One of the basic elements of music is tonality.  Why audiophiles are so reluctant to directly alter tone is a mystery to me.  I imagine if someone had a perfect room and their loudspeakers perfectly interacted with that perfect room, then perfectly recorded music would never need tonal adjustments in that situation.

@onhwy61 Bingo! 

However it’s not that they are reluctant to alter the tone, it’s that they are reluctant to admit that by constantly box swapping thats exactly what they are doing. Afraid of getting their audiophile card revoked I suppose.  

like almost all things, it is a trade-off. The extra bits in the circuit , gain stages, caps, power supply additional input and output cables, possible impedence mismatch and potential to overload preamp AND altering of phase ( above 100-120 HZ the ear is quite sensitive to phase, below not and the wave is big )... all that is traded to shape frequency response....which depending on the recording may need a tweak EVERY song......so yes many any Audiophile has disdain, even for the high end models ( of which there are not many )

I tell people IF you want a nice starter EQ get a McIntosh Labs preamp with that functionality, it is also defeatable and out of circuit in purist mode. You might find a few of the bands effective with a tweak of just 1-3 db

as for the recording chain, not just at live events, very very very few recordings made w zero EQ......even so called audiophile mixing boards have EQ, but it is well executed and phase shift minimized...

have fun

enjoy the music

argue less

listen more

peace