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The use of equipment as "tone controls"

Several times in my Audiogon reading and posting over the last couple of years, I've noticed this or that contributor commenting along the lines of: "You shouldn't use your amp/cables/cartridge/whatever as a tone control."

I assume what this is supposed to mean is that there is some absolutely correct sound out there, and we ought not have audio equipment of any kind that deviates from that absolutely correct sound.

I might be able to buy into this if we were listening to live instruments (although their sound is, of course, affected by the space in which they are played, the position of the listener, etc., so is not itself "absolute"). But we're not listening to live music. We're listening to recordings. There are microphones, cables, recording equipment, mastering equipment, storage medium, etc, all of which come between us and the original sound--not to mention the taste and perception of the engineers, producers, etc. In that sense, what we hear coming out of our speakers is all illusion, anyway. And the illusion comes in quite a few "flavors." On one system I had, Bill Evans at the Village Vanguard sounded like he was in my living room. But Leonard Bernstein conducting the NY Phil in the early 60's was so shrill it made me run screaming from the room. In my current system, Bill Evans doesn't sound as "right there" as he used to (now I'm a few of rows back, yet still quite happy), but Leonard Bernstein doesn't make my ears bleed, either.

How did I work that? I experimented with different equipment. I used the equipment as "tone controls" (I guess). It's all respectible equipment: ARC, VTL, BAT, Cardas, etc. Maybe it reduced the "accuracy" of the reproduction of Bill Evans, but it increased the "accuracy" of the reproduction of Leonard Bernstein. Maybe. But who knows for sure?

We all tailor the sound of our systems to suit our preferences. What's wrong with that? And, most equipment has it's own sound character. That seems like a good thing, to me. It allows us to tailor our sound.

Now what we REALLY need is a good set of tone controls on our fancy pre-amps, so we can really tailor our sound!

Food for comment?
eweedhome
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
7,068 posts
 
The idea of tone controls is very different from the idea of using equipment **as** tone controls!

The whole point of high end audio (IMO) is to get as close to reproducing the original musical event as possible. If you have ever played with tone controls on a test bench, you find most of them to really mess with the signal, even set flat.

For this reason, for years the best tone controls made were in the Harmon Kardon Citation 1. Set flat, they were truly flat. But the circuit that drove them still added distortion while limiting bandwidth and detail.

This last bit is why high end products don't have tone controls (BTW, to my ear the Cello Palette never brought home the bacon either). It is simply an attempt to create a simpler signal path where less things can go wrong.

The problem after that is twofold- poor recordings and poor designs. To get after the recordings you have to get the original recording, usually from the country in which the recording was made. Almost universally that will get you to the best sound available for that recording.

The equipment is a lot trickier IMO, but one thing I have learned over the years is **do not** match weaknesses of one piece to countervail against the weaknesses in another piece. It might sound OK with certain recordings, but there will come along a record that will really show up what is wrong with that approach. That seems to be what has been discussed a lot in the above posts.

Instead one must choose equipment for compatibility, not synergy- synergy is the matching of weaknesses, compatibility is matching strengths. For more on this see
http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

The better equipment is matched, the less will be the need or desire for tone controls.
jafox
1,348 posts
 
Great response from Atmasphere on the issue of synergy. I agree wholeheartedly. "Balance", rather than synergy, has often been the word I have used to implement a system of products on their strengths. But "compatibility" is a great description of this process.
cdc
1,412 posts
 
Given the option, what would people here choose?

1) Correct a bad recording which has a 4dB dip in the bass with tone controls.

or

2) Less distortion, less bass, and no tone controls.
jafox
1,348 posts
 
I'd rather have an "anomaly" in the bass than run the signal through a filter and risk the loss of detail, ambiance, dynamic contrasts, etc., in the other 8-9 octaves. Now if you can correct this bass dip through a bi-amp process, whereas the upper octaves are sent directly to the associated amp, rather than also going through the "correction" device, that may be work out .... but this has its own set of problems and added cost. Ultimately, I find that simplicity wins for me every time.
atmasphere's avatar
atmasphere
7,068 posts
 
I have plenty of recordings that seem bass deficient to me. I don't listen to recordings for bass or lack thereof- I listen to the music (unless I'm doing some sort of reference work). I do want honesty though, I'll take the lack of bass in some recordings any day!
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