Tone controls

Not anymore. It's a crutch and one I've weened myself off of, over the years.

 

Thanks, it's a monster with a lovely sound. Weighs about 75 pounds!

 

I have tone controls but I hide them when my audiophile friends come over.

 

That's funny

 

In fact most modern studio monitors are powered, their amplifiers designed with built in equalization for optimizing the system to flat. We listen to recordings made with these monitors, which is ok, but not ok to play back with tone controls? The other heresey is in the phono RIAA section, which for better or worse introduce minor time delays (phase angle) with the necessary de-emphasis, in essence a tone control. A well designed phono section will definitely open up the sound stage, well worth the time and investment.

A well designed control amp can also be for better or worse, depending on its quality and use. (or misuse) I am not against flat, not against bypass, a very great thing to take any stage out of the signal path. I have found many recordings benefit by a conservative amount of adjustment, and at no audible expense of nuance and reverb trail offs, etc. So I am not against tone controls. Personally I prefer to season to taste, or correct an obviously bright recording or vice versa.

 

Some people are of the idea that if the recording was put out a certain way, that is the way they want to hear it, and some people do not want to have to deal with excessively bright, bassy, or forward recordings when their listening experience would be so much better with things fixed how they prefer it. To each his own, but the idea that tone controls necessarily reduce the "purity" of the sound is technical nonsense when, as you point out, there is no flatness in the recording chain to begin with especially with LP's. You have the RIAA emphasis and de-emphasis and then, no one could cut any recording with any dynamics without additional processing like limiting and de-essing unless they were willing to go through a lot of cutter heads.

 

So, just clutter up the signal chain more?

 

My equipment has no tone controls and when I had equipment with I used the by-pass switch for the reasons many gave above. I also experienced what you are experiencing. I worked on the room and switched to a tube preamplifier and amplifiers. These three things worked very well for me. The biggest improvement though was found with the room treatments. Still bad recordings are bad recordings so if I want to listen to them I use the volume control and just listen at a much lower volume which eliminates much of the higher end shrillness that bothers me the most on poorly recorded music. I also noticed that most early CD recordings were poor so I ended up, unfortunately, buying the same CD multiple times in search of that great recording. Fortunately there are many nicely recorded CDs out now where in the beginning of collecting them there weren't. What I am noticing now is newly remastered CDs are coming out that have no dynamics, it pedal to the metal, which is annoying but not as bad as the early recorded shrill CDs of yesteryear.

 

I'm glad my set-up is still at the every-man level where a little turn of a bass or treble control can make a troublesome recording much more enjoyable. I don't think I want to reach a stage where I sit there listening to an album, unwilling to make an adjustment to make it more enjoyable, all in the name of some endless quest for purity.

 

I would much rather have the source sound good to me, as opposed to fretting about whether I've sullied the purity of my audio system by turning a knob.

 

I never felt the need for tone controls. I have a few CDs which require EQ correction, because the mastering is too treble-heavy.

For those, I have ripped the discs and play the files through my DAC using foobar2000, which has a graphic equalizer and the possibility to adjust other things (mono switch, reverse channels, etc).

So I don't need to have those rarely required sound manipulation functions in my amp.

 

Both of my Decware Torii Mk III amps have "tone controls" that are very unconventional in nature. I use them, I'm very happy to have them.

Here is what the designer/builder Steve Deckert has to say about them:

The treble and bass controls for each channel are less than conventional. The treble control is a simple shunt to ground meaning it's not in the signal path. It was designed to roll off the top end frequencies should they become too loud. There is no “flat” position of this control because it changes from one loudspeaker to another. It has to be set by ear. One way to do this is to simply turn it all the way down (counter clockwise) and then slowly raise it until you're satisfied with the amount of treble.

The Bass Control is not a frequency adjustment as the name would suggest. Instead what this control does is allow you to adjust how much interaction your loudspeaker has with the amplifier. This works by placing the voice coil of your loudspeaker in parallel with the cathode resistor of the input stage in this amplifier. As the impedance rises the gain of the amplifier is reduced in real time as the music plays. The control simply lets you vary how much this happens. The result varies widely from one speaker to another so again there is no such thing as a “flat” position on the control. In fact it can even work backwards with some speakers, so you simply have to listen and adjust. I usually start with the Bass Control fully counter clockwise and experiment from there.

 

You, not I have to do the cost benefit analysis: add a few more resistors, caps, inductors and so forth to the thousands the signal has already been through to make the recording more listenable, or not. That is, you have to do it for yourself, and I have to do it for myself.

Of course in a well designed signal chain you could just take the EQ out completely when not in use and only use it when you want.

But, use your own discretion in this matter.

My next door neighbors are vegetarians, but they don't care that I am not, and I don't care that they are. Similarly, others' choices do not bother me.

 

This is very similar to the Variable Damping controls optionally offered for a short time by McIntosh and a couple of others.

 

I agree 100%. I used to be caught up in not using tone controls. Used the whole "that's not how the band/producer intended it to sound" argument. But I'm past that now. I just want it to sound good to me. And if I prefer more bass than my paltry system produces, then I'll add it artificially. Maybe when I can afford a $50,000 system, I won't need to use the tone controls.

 

I miss me a good ol 3-band eq.

 

A mixed metaphor, but the implication seems to be that those who use tone controls are either handicapped or infantile. I don't know whether that's what you intended, Peter, but I simply cannot understand how a hobby dedicated to something as beautiful as music is so often marred by elitism and condescension.
-Bob

 

I don't know about tone controls, but it would be nice to have something to cope with very good music that is ruined by low dynamic range.

 

I have noticed quite a few new members chiming in, so for the interest of proliferation of and enjoyment of this hobby, does anyone really want to sour that? The elitist has the right to express their views and be enamored by their hardware and music, but more gently, and they, themselves to not be harassed for sharing their experiences.

Nobody is perfect, except The Beatles!
Steve VK

 

Simple, just add lots of bass and treble, turn up the volume, and cover your ears!

 

Just a few thoughts and facts,
Every electronic component, capacitor, resistor, potentiometer, cable length, wiring method, will degrade the purity of the signal. I think everyone here is aware. Volume controls are lossy too. The quality of the control, (ie: a stepped volume control) the circuit it's wired in, impedance, passive vs active, etc., will factor in. Hearing becomes more acute as volume increases, up to a point, the listening experience enhanced as the air in motion enveloped the listener in a field of energized air.

And so as the volume control, or potentiometer, is turned up, it decreases resistance in the signal path, the signal becomes more pure, dynamics more accurate, nuance more open and satisfying.

Guitars and amplifiers are similar to high fidelity, the obvious difference being the production of music vs the reproduction of music. The same laws of physics apply, the same electronic components (caps, resistors..) behave in the same way. For example a guitar pickup is a high impedance device. It is interfaced to the amp input through passive volume and tone controls on the guitar, and a 0.05uf capacitor, typically. The capacitor is in circuit always, even as the tone is all the way up to its most treble setting. The removal of the tone control pot and capacitor results in an audibly brighter tone, and touch sensitive playability. For this reason, some guitars feature a tone bypass switch, either stock or modified by the player. For the most part, most players need the tone control. The volume and tone pots also slightly veil the sensitivity of the pickups.

A guitar and amp isn't exactly high fidelity, but a more obvious example of how pots and caps can veil the signal. Removal of the volume control, would be advantageous, but every guitar player has to have a volume control on the guitar.

In these same terms, volume controls, and tone control sections also place a veil on the music, however small or not. The quality of the controls and circuit plays a large factor of how audible this effect may be.

I am personally not against tone controls, but also realize the advantages of not having them. A well designed control amp, in my experience is a neutral insert, ie: Luxman's uptilt/ downtilt control.

I am certain, 100%, that more losses are introduced daily by capacitance and resistance in cable connections than by control amps. The numbers of switches in the signal path can be a problem. Resistance and capacitance can develop as the contacts wear, become contaminated, or corroded. The absence of these in the signal path certainly removes the potential for losses.

I love simplicity. In the world of audiophile music reproduction, simplicity is our best friend... or as simple as we can bear without losing too much.
Steve VK

 

Was I talking about you? I was talking about myself, not sure how you got elitist from that.

Seems like you're just taking my comment a tad bit personal, for some reason. You can do whatever you want, it doesn't matter to me.

 

Hi Peter,
No, I didn't take your comments personally, but I did take them literally. Perhaps I should not have. As I said, I don't know whether you intended the implication that a crutch is for the handicapped and that infants are weaned. If I misconstrued your intention, I apologize; I was just taking the implications to what I believe is a logical conclusion.
-Bob

 

I have no tone controls on my preamp and can't afford a decent equalizer so I move and / or add sound absorbers or diffusers to the room along with moving the speaker around to fine tune the sound. Takes a little more time than twisting a knob but much more satisfying.

 

Well indeed, the very nature of audio perception changes greatly with level. For example (but not just this) everyone here already knows about Fletcher-Munson curves, ie how 'tone' perception changes with level ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher–Munson_curves

Personally, I find listening level to be a far bigger factor than EQ variation - as to achievement of a sense of 'realism' and enjoyment. I'm neither for nor against tone controls, but I do try to listen at a consistent level. How many people here on the forum have any sound level metering at home, even a simple one - only a few I guess ? Yet our hearing has level-variable EQ built in, and so are 'surrogate tone controls' anyway. I find that getting listening level to appear 'realistic' unlocks what one wants/needs from EQ if any in the system/room treatment. I suppose people's taste in listening level is very variable. I also reckon most people listen too quietly, BTW - often just because of practicality.