Bass and Treble Dials

I understand your thoughts Kijanki. Room treatments to dampen peaks in room frequency and go along way to help give us a flatter response. Agreed, but in some rooms, the only way to flatten response would be some type of frequency control... Obviously subwoofers are very low frequency, but many these days are electronically altered. I do and have used room treatments and agree its the way to go, but as I wrote earlier. I understand that Jim Bonjourno's Ambrosia preamp does a very good job with tone controls... I believe that it is possible for an eq to be built that would do a good job without destroying a sound stage, small increments that very evenly add frequency to channels equally, why do tweeters with a high end rise or a roll off still image? Or a mid with a dip or a peak? Frequency alone does not destroy imaging.
Again, I don't use them, but don't find them an enemy either.

The less in the signal path the purer the sound.I play some of my low gain cds with my passive linestage removed so that the cdp goes into my 300b set amps direct.
The system sounds incredible and open this way.A warning however as this can be very dangerous and not all systems can handle it,so I recommend trying this only with extreme caution.

Regards,

Today's technology permits more precise specific corrections than yesteryear's crude "Bass and Treble Dials".

Timlub,

Capacitors used in analog tone controls have tolerance of few percent producing different phase shifts between channels. Same goes for limited track to track matching of the tone potentiometer. Capacitors, in addition, have dielectric absorption - introducing distortion. Good caps can be very expensive. Cheap Mylar cap is often the reason for the tweeter glare in many low cost speakers.

Unsound,
Yes, accurate filtering is possible in DSP processing, but signal has to be digitized to start with and then converted back to analog again (two conversions). In addition it doesn't solve many problems. For instance some of my Jazz CDs have acoustic bass coming a little strong (nature of the recording). How can I reduce it (or should I?) without changing sound of lower piano registers. On the other side of the frequency spectrum - how can I make cymbals to sound stronger without changing timbre of voice or not making violins "screechy". Harmonic structure of many instruments is incredibly complex and I don't want to touch it. Less is more.

It doesn't necessarily need to be converted to analog, therefore it's possible not to introduce any new conversions, except for pulse conversion. Perhaps such equalization is best left to room correction, rather than re-engineering existing recordings? Future technologies might be able to identify and correct for individual instruments, but I have no idea when that might happen, if it happens at all.