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  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
ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,306 posts
 
vtvmtodvm - 

Thanks for taking the time to write all that up.  Very useful.
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prof
3,469 posts
 
@vtvmtodvm

I completely missed your extended lesson on setting up the JL subs!!!!

Thanks a billion for taking that time! I will go through it more carefully when I’m about to set up the subs. I also have the Soundoctor tracks and the set up advice pages that came with that CD.

Every time I think "ok, this weekend I’ll set up my subs" I look at the steps to get it right (using a crossover) and it looks so damned daunting I can never find the time. I first tried using the high level input method, taking a line off my speaker terminals. That didn’t seem to work so well (lost dynamics and tone). So I went on to buying the CR-1 crossover to "do it right" as all the subwoofer fanatics insist.

The problem is once I’m doing things like crossing over main speakers way up at 80Hz it seems like I’ve then tossing out what the speaker designer did and I’m designing a new speaker. And who the hell am I to design a speaker? It takes years and years for speaker designers to learn how to conquer crossover design, and I’m going to toss out what they did and do better over a weekend? Doesn’t compute for me. The potential for utterly screwing up the sound seems massively more probable than making things better.

But...somehow others do it all the time. So...in I plunge...at some point.

One issue for me is all my source equipment is down the hall from my speaker room, so I can’t easily have the CR-1 in the same room to dial things in. Thus I’ve bought long interconnects to be able to bring the CR-1 into my listening room just for the set up procedure.

At the moment I do have my two JL subs flanking just outside and behind the main speakers by a couple feet or so. Given the limitations of my room space, that is literally the only option EXCEPT I’d actually like to keep the right sub where it is and place the other on the room diagonal which puts it behind my listening sofa to my left side. Supposedly this is one of the good set ups for smooth bass and the other bonus is getting one more sub out of sight (I hate the look of subs).
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