2. misc-audio
  3. 135979-20253

We give up perspective to avoid tone controls

Hi Everyone,

While most of my thread starters are meant to be fun, I realize this one is downright provocative, so I'm going to try extra hard to be civil. 

One thing that is implicit in the culture of "high end audio" is the disdain for any sort of electronic equalization. The culture disdains the use of anything other than a volume control. Instead we attempt to change everything to avoid this. Speakers, speaker cables, amplifiers, and power cords. We'll shovel tens of thousands of dollars of gear in and out of our listening room to avoid them. 

Some audiophiles even disdain any room acoustic treatments. I heard one brag, after saying he would never buy room treatments: "I will buy a house or not based on how good the living room is going to sound." 

What's weird to me, is how much equalization is done in the mastering studio, how different pro speakers may sound from what you have in your listening room, and how much EQ happens within the speakers themselves. The RIAA circuits in all phono preamps IS a complicated three state EQ, we're OK with that, but not tone controls? 

What attracts us to this mind set? Why must we hold ourselves to this kind of standard? 

Best,


E
erik_squires
erik_squires OP
16,021 posts
 
@nonoise 

And this is kind of the problem. I mean, we give up any alleged "damage" for the sake of purity. Aren't we a little obsessed, to the detriment of our actual enjoyment and experience? 

Best,

E
nonoise's avatar
nonoise
10,820 posts
 
@erik_squires

Definitely. It was when I used the tone controls on my integrated and then asked about it, thinking I’d solved my problems and liking the results, that "they pulled me back in," like Pacino said in Godfather III.

All the best,
Nonoise
vegasears
1,173 posts
 
My pre-has electronic tone controls but I've not used them.  Yet, my computer based music server playback software has an EQ and I have used it on a few albums that have great music but were poorly engineered/mix.   

I look at the subject this way.  It's my music, I paid for it and I'll listen to it anyway I want.  
Post removed 
ieales's avatar
ieales
1,201 posts
 
Tone controls are like ketchup. Great on fries, not so much on most everything else. I became hooked on tone-less preamps by db and Dayton-Wright.

Only a miniscule number of discs require any EQ surgery and degrading the many for the few does not make sense. Adjusting level a db or two can often as not change adjust the tonal balance to make listenable enough and usually not much worse than tone controls that have their inflection points too far removed from the problem area.

As far as "seriously missing out", it's true. Without tone controls we're missing:
 - detail loss and masking
 - frequency dependent channel balance
 - non-linear frequency response
 - phase shift

Like most everything, there's no free lunch and we all have to choose our poison.

More to discover