What happened to the loudness control?

I should have said a variable loudness filter controled by a knob and not a button. I dont like the button type loudness, but found the variable knob control usefull.

I am amazed that you people are happy to run the signal through another attenuator and more unneeded connections. This stuff degrades the signal. And you say that the signal is already degraded, so why not add a little more. That stuff adds up. You may be coloring the sound with those fun buttons and knobs, but you are also putting layers of haze over it.

Mabey we should all have 10 types of interconnects hanging on the wall ready to swap out for different recordings. This would be the purist way, but tone controls are so much easier. Tone contoles do degrade the signal but sometimes it just sounds better when they are in the circuit with some recordings.

The obvious absence of tone/loudness controls on hi-fi equipment is one of the strangest paradoxes of this hobby, and is a reason why many audiophiles are considered waco's (that's in reference to another thread currently active). As someone aptly mentioned, audiophools have no trouble keeping a stable-full of IC's, speaker cables etc. that are used as de-facto tone controls. It's well known that your room and the listening environment is one huge tone-control. Audio components all have distinctly different tone-control signatures. Studio-recording engineers are butchering and over-processing live material.
And yet, despite all of the above, a true-blue "audiophile" with foam on his mouth will rebel against any sort of EQ in one's system under the phony pre-text of some mythological distortion...Lunacy? You betcha!

I think it's going to snow this July; I'm agreeing with Onhwy61 in quite a few posts lately.

As stated above, the Fletcher - Munson Curve still applies. Listening to an audiophile system at low volume shows how far off things can be. I always scratch my head with amazement when I see people throw such large amounts of money at building a system, only to listen at 70 dB. The tonal response just being completely wrong...