Preamps ... no bass or treble control?

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.

to me the whole lack of tone controls is nonsense & causes people to invest huge amounts of cash into other areas like cables & room treatments,i dont get it & i never will,to each his own but for me i'll never own a preamp without tone controls or balance,i use them too much.

my pre has a tone bypass & it sucks,i cant listen to music that has a flat response,to me it sounds steril with no life.

if i were you & just startin out in the hobby i would avoid pre's that dont have tone controls & only buy gear that allows you to tailor your sound atleast until you figure out what sounds good in your listening area & try not to get too caught up in all the voodoo.

mike.

I think Bigjoe is right. Although I own a tube preamp without any tone controls (just volume) & have had many other high end preamps of the same design, I also own one with them. I have a B&K PT3 that has bass & treble settings but there are no mechanical knobs to turn. The settings are all done with the remote. It is very nice sometimes to adjust the tone settings slightly to offset room acoustics & recordings that need this compensation. I'll be damn if I can tell they are hurting the music signal in any way because it still sounds very transparent/airy, & detailed. I might get away on this thread by saying: One slight turn of a tone control can save you hundreds or maybe thousands in interconnects & room treatments etc. Naturally people with unlimited resources will disagree but a well engineered preamp with tone controls will do less harm to the signal and I'm enjoying my music tremendously either way!