Balance control. Discuss.

because your room or your hearing acuity might not be perfectly symmetrical.

Your recordings may or may not be ideally balanced for your setup (equipment and room) and your hearing. As such a balance control can act as a fine focus control for soundstage and imapging info. The balance control should be useable from the listening position.

" The balance control should be useable from the listening position."

I've never had that luxury. Normally you have to jump up, run across the room, tweak, and then repeat until you say "Ahhhh!". =-} Then you have that chair set up, and don't have to do it again.

It's like Sheldon on "Big Bang Theory" finding just the right spot in a room, only you have a knob to make most all of the spots the "Sheldon spot".

Once you set up for one spot, other places in the room may not sound so good.

Have you seen the episode of "Big Bang" in which Sheldon goes to the theater and goes around the room making "MMAAWWHHAA!" sounds? He's looking for the acoustic sweet spot.

My pre doesn’t have a balance control. There are times when I would use it to correct for a recording’s image position within soundstage.

Opps! Should of said ‘could use one’. Hard to use one that you don’t have.

If you use a turntable.....many cartridges have an imbalance between channels of up to 2dB.
Then there's your room acoustics and also your listening position....
The Balance dial is your friend....😘

It's also incredibly useful for quick channel balance checks.

Because at your seaside home which has begun sliding into the sea you may wish to have proper balance for one last listen prior to losing it all.

I found it useful due to my odd shaped room. No way I could live without this function.