"Mark D" wrote in message


Hi All, Sorry if this has been covered a zillion times
before, but I have some questions concerning Hi-End
equipment, and thier features, or I should say, lack of.

I notice that many modern high end Pre-Amplifiers have an
absence of simple Tone Controls.

A consequence of the widespread belief that any component
part that comes even vaguely near the signal path will
audibly corrupt the sound. This paranoia even extends to
chassis materials.

I basically understand the reasoning behind this, as the
simpler the chain, the less interference, or
"destruction" I should say of the purity of sound by
introducing Tone Controls into the Pre-Amplifier's
Circuitry.

I revel in the irony of people whose idea of "personal
preference" involves making choices that have no reliably
audible effect on sound quality, while eschewing making
choices with the knobs of an equalizer, which do have a
reliably audible effect on sound quality.

Do purists now cringe at the thought of having at least a
Bass-Treble Control on thier Pre-Amps?

So it seems.

We would all assume with these modern Pre-Amps, that the
signal produced would be flat from xxHz to xx,xxxHz, but
I wonder what one now does due to inefficiencies in room
acoustics, or the inefficiencies of a given speaker?

There's a history behind this.

In the early days of stereo, there were lots of small
speakers (smaller size dictated by the need for 2) that
lacked bass. In order to sound good, you had to turn up the
bass, which was only a partial solution because the speakers
were so nonlinear at low frequences that bass boosting only
made them sound muddy. People turned the bass up anyway, but
a turned-up bass control was a sign of guilt.

The first *improvement* to this was provided by the loudness
switch. It provided a bass boost at low frequencies that was
reduced at higher volumes, partially alleviating the muddy
bass problem. The switch was far less conspicious than the
boosted bass control, so it provided reduced guilt.

The second improvement was low-efficiency small speakers
that actually had some bass. For many people neither a
loudness switch nor a bass boost control was required, and
all sins were *forgiven*. It thus became a status symbol to
have audio gear that lacked either tone controls or a
loudness countour because you had speakers that were good
enough to require neither.

Does one with these caliber of systems now have to
typically resort to modifying thier speaker's x-overs,
spend countless $100's, to $1,000's of dollars in room
treatments, call in the "sound techs-geek squad" for
advice-testing or what?

Current wisdom is that the best approach to getting good
sounds is room acoustics improvements, not equalizers. Room
acoustics treatments cost more money as well, so both audio
perfectionism and also snob appeal is optimized again by
means of avoiding tone controls, loudness switches or
equalizers.

Is the addition of a simple Graphic EQ such a taboo thing
nowadays?

I seriously doubt that there are many commercial recordings
that have not undergone some kind of signal processing, a
goodly chunk of which nets out to be some kind of
equalization.

So, if equalizers are a curse against good sound, virtually
all commercial recordings come from the factory, pre-cursed.

I do see EQ's in abundance for the pro user, but really
not much available for the home audio user?

A lot of pro gear has crossed over to home use. Of all the
kinds of pro gear around, the equalizers are the most likely
to have RCA jacks in addition to the usual audio production
standard XLR and/or TRS jacks. Furthermore, pro equalizers
that don't come from the factory with RCA jacks are often
upgraded with RCA jacks in the field. For example I picked
up a number of Rane SP-12 parametric (a low-noise version of
the PE-12) equalizers on eBay from different sellers that
came with different *audiophile grade* RCA jacks added by
the previous owner.