who wants tone controls on your next preamp?

An audiophile and tone controls should not be in the same sentence, unless that audiophile has a hearing deficiency in a certain frequency.

Be honest, some audiophiles don't have the intelligence to properly use high quality tone controls. You know who you are!

Zydo, I had a phase linear 4000 designed by bob carver with all kinds of tone controls. I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

"Don't need them; don't want them. And I don't want to pay for the cost increase that the inclusion of high quality tone controls in a product would lead to; this stuff is expensive enough as it is!"

Al - I feel the same. I want neutral system that plays what artist intended/approved. For the same reason I don't climb the stage during concert to adjust their tone to my liking.

I also noticed that with inexpensive receiver and speakers I had long time ago every record sounded bad without tone adjustment plus highs and lows were disappearing at low volumes. Today with very simple but better quality system (DAC+Power amp) every CD sounds different but nice and at low volume bass and treble are still there. I have no explanation for that but I would rather invest in quality than number of pieces in the chain. Tone controls or equalizers might help with bad room acoustics but it should be fixed with room treatments without sacrificing transparency.

The last time I recall actually using the tone controls when I had them was to sometimes adjust the sound of one source when my system was tuned for another, for example digital versus phono. Also sometimes to get speakers in different rooms to sound more similar. My system is a bit unique in this way in that I have 5 pairs of speakers in 5 different rooms all hooked into the same system. Getting each room to sound similarly good to my ears was not an easy task.

Then I set a goal to get each source and room to sound as similar as possible out of the box. Once I accomplished that to my satisfaction, the tone controls sat mostly unused. Now, I have everything pretty well tuned to a particular sound regardless of source or speaker/room combo, so tone controls are not missed.