Preamps ... no bass or treble control?

I like tone controls since my room isn't optimal and many recordings are crap. I believe these people who say they don't want controls because it mucks up the signal path are kidding themselves - their room screws it up way more than that but I guess they don't know or care. I only trust a flat in-room frequency response for hearing "true" and "pure" sound the way the recording was meant to be. If you want tone controls, get them - just look for preamps with them like McIntosh. Arthur

Morbius, all active circuitry in some way distorts a signal passing through it, but there are orders of magnitude of distortion. DSP opens up a wide range of filters that practically speaking are not available in analog. My understanding is that some these filters exhibit far less ringing and other time domain distortions than typically used analog implemented filter type. Additionally, DSP allows a designer to chain filters together to compensate for the faults of a particular filter type. It sounds like a kludge, but if the processing power is there, why not use it. I'm not an engineer and I am regurgitating what I've been told by experienced audio engineers, so if I am totally off base, feel free to educate/correct me. Ultimately, the good sound trumps all and my direct experience indicates that some digital EQs sound far worst than others, which is also my experience with analog EQs.

Jw94055, why stop there? Eliminate your volume control! Seriously, a balance control is essential for dialing in soundstage info on some records. As with tone controls, a poorly designed one is pretty useless, but a well designed balance control can really bring the soundstage into focus.

Onhwy61,

It is true that one can implement some more sophisticated
filters in a digital implementation than would be practical
in analog. Your example re: ringing is a good one. One can
implement higher-order filters that have group delays tailored
to prevent ringing - which would be prohibitive for the
equivalent analog filter.

However, more and more I see the "hawking" of digital processing
as a panacea for all audio ills. DSP can side-step some of
the ills of analog circuits - but DSP has its own set of
problems which can be just as bad [ex. Gibb's phenomenon ]
unless those that implement the technology do it carefully.

Dr. Gregory Greenman
Physicist

We have a George Wright AU-1000 (a/k/a AG-1000 with a gold face plate) that has tone controls. With a slight turn of the bass knob, we're able to enough bottom end even with his 4W SET mono blocks that we sold our sub. As others have suggested, recordings (and rooms) are not perfect. Have you heard Wilco's "A Ghost is Born"? When listening to that CD, I actually have to turn the bass down!

Onhwy61, Thank you... I have never heard Phase, Time, Coherancy change and all this extra distortion everyone believes is in circuits with Tone controls, but I listen to rock at HIGH levels and Absolutly any room I own needs some type of attenuation, Unless you can add subs or completly build the perfect room around a speaker, If you can say you have enough Slam out of every recording you got, then you like boring or Zero colored sound, thats fine but not everyone can have 10,000 invested in a system and not want it to flex the walls once in a while and get that Full Growl sound to impress the friends, So no I have never found any system completly satisfying when Absolutly Flat, VERY few recordings are fine this way in my experiance, now again I do not have much Jazz or Classical so its possible this is Possible, but if you want any kinda control to help enjoy the Weight of your system just in case then sorry I gotta have tone controls once in a while. But again some people really like the old beatles recordings sounding like they sometimes originally do coming out of a Transistor radio(don't take it literal) so go for it. Not slamming anybody but I am not a purist at all Add Colors to the wall if you ask me, I hate liveing in all white houses I tried to many times with the Hiend preamps and always found them dry to some extent especially ARC tubes, but never had super hiend ARC so who knows.