2. misc-audio
  3. 135979-20253

We give up perspective to avoid tone controls

Hi Everyone,

While most of my thread starters are meant to be fun, I realize this one is downright provocative, so I'm going to try extra hard to be civil. 

One thing that is implicit in the culture of "high end audio" is the disdain for any sort of electronic equalization. The culture disdains the use of anything other than a volume control. Instead we attempt to change everything to avoid this. Speakers, speaker cables, amplifiers, and power cords. We'll shovel tens of thousands of dollars of gear in and out of our listening room to avoid them. 

Some audiophiles even disdain any room acoustic treatments. I heard one brag, after saying he would never buy room treatments: "I will buy a house or not based on how good the living room is going to sound." 

What's weird to me, is how much equalization is done in the mastering studio, how different pro speakers may sound from what you have in your listening room, and how much EQ happens within the speakers themselves. The RIAA circuits in all phono preamps IS a complicated three state EQ, we're OK with that, but not tone controls? 

What attracts us to this mind set? Why must we hold ourselves to this kind of standard? 

Best,


E
erik_squires

Showing 1 response by jim204

jim204
881 posts
 
I am of the opinion and although this may seem bullish , we pay for our music and if we want to use tone controls then why not if it makes listening to them more pleasurable. Also some people of a certain age have quite a loss at the treble frequencies and a few decibels of eq. can make all the difference. I now only listen to music through very high quality headphones and a DAW that has lots of jitter busting software on it so is a very resolving system. The worst thing I find especially in solo piano recordings is that some notes are very much louder than others and it can be infuiating to listen to as when you hear the same work in concert this regulation anomaly is usualy absent. As an example I recently purchased a hi rez download of Murray Perahia playing Bach Paritias and two notes on the piano were really shouting at me and it was really annoying to the point that had I not the means to save it , it would have been wasted money.
As I am really into recording now and then I use on some recordings my Digital recording program Sequoia and using some very juditious Eq. on the file renders it a completely different experience it's as if Mr Perahia said to the piano tuner to sort out the loud notes and soften them.
Now I came from an era where tone controls were completely normal and one of the best ones was from Quad Electroacoustics and their method was gentle slopes which could make a great difference to a recording and this was many years before room tuning. I am not saying every pre amp should be issued with them but I am saying it is not an offence for some of them to have them.

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