I like my system flat, no tone controls, no eq..........what is your preference, and why.

I have to admit that at that price there isn't much to lose by trying.

I've lived in my current abode for twenty five years. In that time I went through a lot of equipment, with even near-desperation at times. I even had to go through moving my wood burning stove that was centered at the gable end of the long wall (the system was located firing across the short side of the room). Moving the wood stove made me able to situate the system so it was located where the stove was, the speakers now firing down the long length of my room.

Now, even though many changes have taken place since moving the stove, I feel very lucky to have what I believe to be a near-perfect room, enabling wonderful sound without room treatments of any kind. Speakers are well away from the walls. I couldn't be any happier, I haven't changed a thing now for a few years, except to repair/replace old equipment as need be.

I feel very fortunate to be in this position, and enjoy it every day without the feeling something needs changing. It's a good feeling, to say the least.

Enjoy, and regards,
Dan 

i really like my decware zrock2. maybe its the fact that my amp only puts out two watts or that a lot of recordings can benefit from a slight bump in mid bass? rather than raising the volume knob a bump on the zrock is my preference.

I'll pass on tone controls. I play music and every song can sound different...some will be bright, while others may not. I assume each song sounds different because of the way it was recorded and I wouldn't want to make adjustments every-time I listen to music.

I’m pretty much a big believer in (good quality) EQ. I now use digital, parametric EQ. The problem with it has always been the noise factor...push too much in the upper mids and you get hash, too much in the midbass or lower mids and you get mud or colorations. Push too much in the low bass and maybe the amp starts to sweat. But then I happened to find a great (but expensive) power treatment solution. One of the benefits, apart from taming all the digital and ss nasties, was curing all those EQ limitations.

But I’ve been using EQ in one form or another for almost 45 yrs now and with prior systems that we’re not nearly as good as my current one. As things progressed over the years, the one thing I learned was that for whatever problem you could want to use EQ for, you could, in the end, invariably trace the roots of that problem back, in effect, to things that could be adjusted, replaced or otherwise fixed without ever having to resort to EQ...even if going that route would cost more, perhaps even significantly more.

But I no longer believe in using EQ to help with "bad recordings" per se. I regard all of that (as above) as some sort of unresolved playback problem of one sort or another...there’s no such thing to me actually as "bad recordings" - they amount to about 1% of my CD’s at current. With my past systems they seemed more like 35-40%. Things have progressed enough for me that I don’t have "problem" recordings and actually have less need for room correction, gear correction, etc. My dependency on EQ has not dropped to zero, I still use a little for the bass and a touch on the top end, but that’s all, anymore these days.

EQ is a terrific (if not indispensable) band-aid to have on hand in the beginning, but in the end, to me, maybe that’s all it really should be...just a band-aid...useful maybe, but not essential. In a "perfect system", EQ would not be needed at all...but then, who among us has the perfect system? Yet, the closer we get to that, I think the less we need it...maybe a good thing, I’d say...it depends on how you weigh out the costs of fixing things the right way vs just using EQ.