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 mikexxyz

mikexxyz
66 posts
 
REW has a function that develops a recommended Eq program based on your measurements or you can do it yourself. You then download it directly into a MiniDSP. It works amazingly well - measuring afterwards it chopped off the bass peaks to give a much smoother response. The trouble is I didn’t like a ruler flat room curve.

Floyd Toole is on record as an advocate of tone controls to help manage speaker/ room interface. I have no issue with tone controls and use them on a second system.

I’ve gone with the advice you gave me last year to work on room acoustics first then add Eq. I’m very satisfied with the room diffusor that I put at the FRP - not so much with the miniDSP Eq part.
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