Yes, use tone contols sparingly, but use them. Do you know who uses tone controls. EVERYONE!!! If you go to a live concert whethervery small or very large. There is a sound board and sound person that controls the tone of the sound. If you attend a live orchestra. There is a 'conductor that controls the volume that the individual artist are playing with hand signals (as well as tempo). In the recording studio. The recording engineer sets the volume of individual insruments while recording. Unless you have the exact same gear and speakers in a duplicate room. You are NEVER going to duplicate any music exactly as it was recorded. So play the music like YOU like. I used to subscribe to the 'straight wire' amplification theory. Until I attended over 150 live concerts and spent 10's of thousnads on my stereo equipment. And realized, EVERYONE is altering the music. So, play it like YOU like.
My take on tone controls: I like to have them available, as long as they can be switched out when not needed, which for me is about 90% of the time. I’ve worked to get my system as evenly balanced as possible in my room and for good recordings, tone controls are not needed. If a recording has lacklustre bass, or the opposite…too much bass, tone controls are useful to adjust this. Same if a recording is overly bright or dull. So I don’t use tone controls for room or system correction but more to make poor recordings (which have great music) more enjoyable. I also like loudness compensation, strictly for low level listening as there are times we can’t always listen as loud as we would like.
I usually turn them off on my pre amp. I do have an EQ I’ll use at times to help with a bad recording but most times it off also. Good info on explanation of the more db the doubling of the power (watts) used.
Tone controls are great for folks that have some hearing loss. As people get oder you naturally lose some hearing, usually in the higher frequency, you can compensate for some of it by cranking up the treble. This was useful when my dad was alive for he had some hearing loss due to age, he was 90 years old. My dad loved music and when I cranked up the treble he really enjoyed the music more. Also in the case of really old recordings from the 30s and 40s adjusting the highs for my dad really made my dad enjoy the music more. Shure the tone controls does add some noise to the signal, but in my dad's case they did more to improve the sound quality than harm it. In a really good preamp such as the stuff you have, I doubt the degradation would be that noticeable. So yes tone control do have value depending on how they are used.
I use tone controls when a recording requires it, otherwise I switch them off. Some recordings (few thankfully) just need some help from tone controls to make them listenable.
We do use tone controls. Tone controls are built into our speakers, these equalizers are politely called crossover networks. Can’t turn them off!! They are also used to “voice” our systems by the manufacturer. They are all over our audio chain.
Thanks for posting this interesting video Clint. I'm now considering uping my amplifier game to the McIntosh MA9500 Integrated Amplifier..a solid state design. This unit is significantly better than any gear I've owned & seems to have plenty enough features packed into its rugged chassis to last me a lifetime. Do you or anyone here have any experience with this unit or the well-known unit it replaced? (MA9000) I appreciate any information you may have. Cheers, David-
You can do what you want, but I'm not getting up out of my chair to adjust the tone of each recording. I want my system to be the reference, and the recordings to be what they are, IMO.
Well, if everything sounds the same or very similar through your speakers, then they have a lot of colorations. Years ago I had a chance to hear a very popular Bose speaker at a very high end audio dealer that was trying to make a point about just that. The Bose made the Spectral audio components through the MIT cables sound pretty much the same as some similar wattage (on paper) amplification with decent cables. Then demonstrated music through the Quad ESL's and some nice Spendor's and you could hear the tiniest changes quite easy, such as changing cables ,footers, even a piece of paper under a foot on the cd player. The Bose were crap. Oh and another thing, being a Linn dealer, their philosophy makes total sense (to a point) in that the source is most important and speakers the least. You cannot put back what the source initially extracts from the lp, cd, sacd, etc. Then the amplifier , and lastly the speakers. Linn is always happy to demonstrate that point.
I dont get it, Are all of you only listening to one style of music? Or only a few albums perhaps? The music i listen to is so diverse that tone control is absolutely necessary. Sometimes i just have to rain in the bass, else my windows would blow out.
My opinion is that tone controls might degrade the music if one does not know how it was meant to be heard. Oh and i think you might want to check the metering of your camera Clint. Funny that it only goes wonky in this room.
Yes. Just adjusting them because you want more of something without knowing what it measures, is tough. I asked on a Fujifilm forum, my shutter speed wasn't locked. Should be good on the next vids. :)
