I miss my Loudness Button and Tone Controls....

I believe it may have been deliberate. Yes, the loudness and tone controls us older folks used in the 70s were crappy circuits with crappy parts. So throw the baby out with the bathwater? Really the beginning of the sham that high end audio has largely become today.

In comes high end marketing. Knowing that few had the knowledge, skills or flexibility to optimize listening/speaker position and acoustics (I agree with a few posts above; if possible those parameters should be optimized before applying equalization or room correction), in comes the marketing nonsense; use expensive wire/coupling/isolation as tone controls or better yet swap out components and speakers in a circular audiophile dance that has made more than one audio manufacturer/distributor/dealer wealthy. Of course, none of that is a cost effective solution, more like polishing a turd.

Like I said earlier, this is the dawn of a new age. Ignore the marketing and high volume e-commerce salesmen (you know who they are, each has at least one full page ad in Stereophile; who do you suppose pays for those?) and use your own ears and brains.

I'm really enjoying my Outlaw 2150 receiver. It has all the right stuff +  bass management feature to boot. Hard to beat for the price as well.

When my equipment had a loudness button, I rarely used it, tone controls a little. Only used the loudness button to show off when I had visitors. Other than that, the sound was much clearer and detailed with it out! Once I found a good parametric equalizer, that was the best for slight adjustments but prefer nothing in the loop for most music.

I have found that electronic tone controls are far less offensive than mechanical pots that are used for tone controls. Given that, on some recordings it is nice to make suttle adjustments that render the music more listenable.

I was in the same boat as you sir! Even so far as to pull up the Cello Audio Palette circuit diagram and see what was so good about it.

There are a couple simple solutions:

A. get the Schiit tone controls

B. get a DAC with LOUDNESS feature.

I went with an RME as my DAC, it has a unique loudness feature. Google the manual for it. It changes with volume. I also remapped the EQ front button to turn loudness on or off. I use a different Preamp.

Have fun and take care, let us know what you get. It’s a common problem.

Posted and saw your phono problem, looks like Schiit for now. Or get another Preamp. I'm A/B ing the RME, I have the Anniversary edition for the extra analog input to run my phono. Will let you know how it goes.