Loudness - Why has the industry stopped producing amplifiers with this feature any longer?

So long as you have a variable loudness and variable volume control, this is a very useful control to have.  I'm afraid it was sacrificed to the "less is more" philosophy, along with (in come occassions) balance controls.  Purist, perhaps, but consumer-unfriendly.

They proclaim Tone Controls = BAD!! Ummm... but there’s this thing they invented call a SWITCH..... and you and just switch them out of the audio path.... and don’t get me started on "oh but that switch is in the signal path and it degrades the sound too..." No! It does’t.

The more transparent your equipment is, the more you hear things like switches. That in itself is a pain because if you have that transparency, then you have to pay a lot more for the switches you get so that they don't cause audible degradation.


Putting myself through engineering school I worked as a service technician repairing consumer electronics. Even when the stuff was new, the tone control defeat switch was one of those parts that was a source of failure- mostly out of disuse, just like the tape monitor switch. I had to assume that as the product ages, such switches will become more problematic.


Funny thing though, once my own system got to a certain level of competency, I didn't miss the tone controls. Even at low volumes the bass was perfectly audible.

Maybe vendors would rather have people have to buy more new stuff when things don’t sound quite right which is almost always in audiophile land. 

I will say the 4 3-way level
Switches  on each of my Ohm F5 speakers is a godsend for helping get things tuned into a room just right.  That’s 3^8 or 6561 different combos. 

Atmasphere, you aren't kidding. All the unused switches in my dad's old HH Scott preamp failed. Not worth fixing. However, in the digital world having such things as room control, bass management, dynamic loudness correction and the ability to juggle your system's frequency response all by computer (no mechanical switches) are real eye openers.
All this can be done without adding any distortion and the DSPs doing it are all operating under a 48 bit system so you can lose a few bits here and there w/o affecting the sound. It is a tweaker's dream come true and a lot of fun. If you get the opportunity you should play around with a dedicated room control processor like the Trinnov ST2 which inserts between your preamp and amplifiers. On bypass it may not sound quite as good as the system without it but engage the room control and you are in a whole new world.