Adding Tone Controls?

Oh for heaven's sake, he's already listening to abysmally recorded albums and you're gonna worry about the supposedly deleterious effects of an equalizer? Some times I wonder if some of you guys made it thru grade school.

Buy a decent parametric equalizer, should be about 200-300 bucks and then dial back the offending frequencies when listening to such albums. When you're listening to "audiophile-approved" recordings, simply switch the EQ out of the signal path...

-RW-

From yr description the offensive recordings suffer from "sibilance" (~6-9kHz).

Unfortunately, unless you use an equalizer, there is little else you can do to correct this situation. This is a unit placed between your source & the amp (or amp->speakers)

BUT active equalizers are typically abysmal sounding and do more harm to the sound than good -- bar a few outrageously expensive ones.
Generally speaking using one is like shooting yself in the foot given your efforts to put together a nicely balanced, great sounding system.

One patch solution is to use zip cable as an equalizer: these cables typically lose high frequency response and may tame the sibilance.