Tone Controls

I find many LPs are not balanced the same left and right channel. A balance control also comes in handy.

Several older "straight wire with gain" preamps provided switchable "loops" specifically for use with an EQ or outboard tone controls. In my opinion, this offered the best of both worlds.

If the recording was poor enough to need "help" in terms of correcting tonal balance or other deficiencies, the use of a simple bass or treble control might not be enough. As such, a more advanced processor or multi-band EQ would be more suitable. One could then completely remove said device from the circuit and switch it in as needed. This also added more flexibility due to the fact that you could add / change / upgrade the external processor as one felt the need without having to "dump" the preamp that may have otherwise been functioning perfectly. Sean
>

With regard to tone controls, I find that there are a few areas with solutions, and some others that demand new software. For LPs, there are a few vintage pre-amps that offer different EQs, other than RIAA. The Mac C-8 actually allows the user to set the eq with 10 switches. This was developed to accomodate the many early EQ formats.

In the case of a basically Good system with some minor Room issues that tone controls might fix, I would suggest looking into the room issues more closely. I realize that tone controls have a higher WAF/SOAF but if the room problem can be IDed and fixed, one might get a significant order of magnitude of improvement - these could be little things like moving the speaker in/out a few inches, etc.

Sean has a good suggestion vis external boxes connected through loops. There have been a few preamps that offer quality tone controls, Cello, Metaxs?, etc, but they are expensive.

Yes this area is over looked, but it is a trouble some area to solve well.
Good luck.

I'm not positive, but I don't think most people avoid tone controls because of what they do...they avoid them because they involve more circuitry being added into the signal path. Most high-end equipment designs try to have the shortest, most simple signal paths, so they avoid tone controls.

If they're already on your equipment, you might as well use them if you prefer. And you're right...almost all recordings are EQ'd to some point...some quite drastically...especially rock/pop recordings.

I predict tone controls will back in the high end equipment landscape in the next few years. My reasoning is I look at the Cello pre that has tone controls and the new DSP stuff that allows signal manipulation in the digital domain at 30 bit/96KHz sampling. Old analoge tone controls like you are all discussing injected phase distortion and temporal smearing of the signal. Digital domain sampling and DSP manipulation can provide tonal shapping without the bad stuff. We just need to wait till these systems come down from the $12K preamps and parametric equalizers to the $5K high end stuff.