To Tone or Not to Tone, that is the question.

I am in the process of moving houses, and as such, I am finally getting around (not that it wasn't a priority) to hooking up my stereo system.

Room treatments, etc... are not installed/set up yet, but the "basic" components are in.

I ran into a situation where I was having an issue with my subwoofer and getting it to play nicely in the new room with different sources.

I am using a Classe CP800 preamp, which allows you to set different "tone controls" (or a complete lack thereof) for each individual source.

I currently have a Yamaha CD-s2100 SACD player and also a cheap Sony DVD/SACD 5 disc changer hooked up.

Playing around in the preamp settings, I put the Sony (borderline junk) on "bypass mode", which made a big improvement to it's sound.

Further playing around, and the Yamaha (a MUCH higher quality unit) sounds better using the tone settings turned on.

Is this normal?

Perhaps after I get the room treatments installed, this will be subject to change?

It just got me thinking/wondering if most folks use their tone controls, or tend to bypass them all together (like I say, in my particular instance, this is independently configurable for each source).

Just struck me as kind of odd, so I figured I would post it here.