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

First i dont need to use the loudness button of my Sansui because of my acoustic control of  gear and room...In fact even if they can be useful i forget to use them because of the very quality of my system/room at all level...

Second i dont like generalization that are evidently wrong: loudness is useful at VERY LOW volume listening for some people in particular in MOST ordinary non dedicated room... I dont use them but i tested them...The usefulness of this button is dependant of the very low level of decibel used and asked for ...

Many people anyway listen music at high level then they dont neeed this button before reaching premature deafness .... 😁😊

By the way , I am pretty sure that i had learn already how to listen if i was able to tune my own room even creating a " mechanical equalizer" myself in the last 2 years of my listening experiments in acoustic...

And also it is impossible to tune a room by listening experiment and using the loudness button at the same time, then i never use it during the tuning process...

But this fact dont make the loudness button a device for acoustically unrefined ears only.... it is useful at very low level listening... This is an EVIDENT fact....

Then buy a mirror before judging device or other people around your own navel ...

The sansui au7700 is a amp 1975 i had the au417 that was mine first amp. That was 1977 with AR speakers and a dual turntable. I never used the loudness button.

Sorry but if you like loudness you dont know how to listen

I forgot to say that i enjoy TWO listening positions in my room which neither of one i can choose over the other one so good the two are...I listened half the time in each position equally...

3 feet from the speakers and 8 feet from the speakers in my square 13 feet room...

The loudness button may be useful ONLY at very low level in my near listening position...

They are not useful for me in my 8 feet location because the decibel level is put higher in this position and the room acoustic give me all necessary bass and highs impact clearly already...

By the way it is another false dogma that a room must be tuned and can be tuned ONLY for one listening position... I enjoy and tune my room for two....With more headphone intimate details effect in near listening but more lively natural sound in the distant position but keeping enough intimacy to beat all my headphones though or rival them...

In the two postions the soundscape encompas me and is "almost" spherically around me because in some recording i am betwen the periphery and the center of the soundscape...Is it not good for a stereo system? When some claim wrongly that the sound can only and must be ONLY between the speakers plane and cannot encompass the listener...

Acoustic method is the audio miraculous wonder over the gear itself....

Yes, the loudness and tone controls us older folks used in the 70s were crappy circuits with crappy parts. 

The SAE Parametric Equalizer in the early seventies was considered to be a very high end piece of audio gear. I used it for a while until I figured out that if a loudspeaker can't do a particular frequency to your satisfaction, you can't force it to sound better. You can emphasize it, but you can't correct it (if that makes any sense)?.

The SAE Parametric Equalizer in the early seventies was considered to be a very high end piece of audio gear. I used it for a while until I figured out that if a loudspeaker can’t do a particular frequency to your satisfaction, you can’t force it to sound better. You can emphasize it, but you can’t correct it (if that makes any sense)?.

Very interesting post... Thanks especially this part:

You can emphasize it, but you can’t correct it (if that makes any sense)?.

In the case of "mechanical equalization" of a room it is like in "electronical equalization" also, we cannot CORRECT a defect in the speakers/gear interaction or in the speakers alone, but we can put the emphaze on some frequencies range that will compensate without correcting the specs and defects or limits of the  gear itself...

You’d be amazed on how well a good a higher end receiver can sound once “professionally “ calibrated using its built in eq (parametric in my case.) Those built in auto eq systems don’t hold a candle to a manual professional calibration. When done properly, the results, ime, have always been better vs bypassing the tone controls or equalizer. Of course, bypassing tone controls is the way to go IF your room acoustics are near perfect, but that’s rare in most cases.