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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 2 responses by whart

whart's avatar
whart
2,972 posts
 
@onhwy61 - have a British friend who loves endurance rallies. Did the Cannonball Baker (not the car one, the bike one) on a pre-war Harley. He was in his mid-'70s at the time. Stiff upper lip and all the rest...
whart's avatar
whart
2,972 posts
 
It’s certainly a question worth revisiting; the assumption that tone controls in the signal path were not ’purist" has held since the early ’70s (as I remember it). As another poster noted, I was stunned at how much a box shop HT pre-pro with DSP cleaned up the subwoofer on a small system and now use an inexpensive DSP unit on the subs supplementing my main system. And agree that a lot of audiophile choices about gear are probably influenced by the house sound or voicing of specific pieces of gear, wire, etc.
What is out there in the market that is reasonably available? The Cello unit was well thought of at its time, but pricey. Pro gear? Parametric multi band eq?
I guess one assumption that continues to hold is that the system should be properly set up, "voiced" and left alone-- not messing with the choices (however questionable) that might have been made in the recording or mastering of a work. But, in that context, EQ could be used to set up the system, even if it isn’t user adjustable thereafter.
Is this easier to do in the digital domain? I know "all analog" buffs are wary of anything with the "D" word, but those who have embraced digital have already made the leap (or sold their souls).
Me- I am increasingly ambivalent about the purist approach, knowing how much gimmickry already goes into to most commercial recordings and how difficult it is to reproduce the illusion.
Many years ago, i had set up a half-assed rear channel system (long before surround sound) that relied on out of phase information (Hafler) and delay lines from a small processor. I used it with a pair of modest bookshelf speakers to supplement my Quad ESLs. When a very knowledgeable friend visited, he said "what is this? Turn it off." Then, after a few moments, ’ah, turn that on again." It worked on some material better than others.
Good topic, worth thinking about, since "we" haven’t changed or questioned our assumptions about this in decades.....
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