who wants tone controls on your next preamp?

If your preamp/amp has inserts, or a tape loop/monitor arrangement, the ideal method to give you sound shaping flexibility is to employ a top flight studio eq unit...

This will in 99% of cases provide a far higher fidelity and configurable/defeatable option than any internal circuit.

Manley make a couple of superb units, as do NEVE, and GML amongst many others, there are also numerous superb tube based mastering quality eq's, some active, some passive (i.e: no boosting, only cutting) which may prove equally effective or moreso !

Funny how some people 'can' the concept of EQ, when in fact most cables, speakers, etc... are all 'voiced' far from neutral by the designer !

More often than not the biggest EQ which many people are in denial of is their listening room/speaker interaction, so instead of treating the cause, they spend money in all the wrong places...'audiophiles' I think they call themselves, when in fact they have never taken time to study rudimentary acoustics theory, and understand very little about the actual recording or reproducing process.

All of that is fine of course, one doesn't need to be a Cordon Bleu chef to appreciate fine food, however more money often equates to less cents ;-)

Carlos, why did you wait until I spent so much money on gear to tell us/me my approach has been wrong all along? :) So yeah, show us an easier, more efficient and affordable way to do this.

I'm 42. I never had a stereo growing up. In the late 70s, the older kids in my neighborhood or my friends brothers all had stereo systems. I couldn't wait to earn some money and put together my own system. Back then, to me, these systems sounded awesome and....they all had tone controls. I don't remember looking for more bass or treble extension, it was all there if we needed it. These days, if your components are lacking in a given area, it seems like it takes a lot of effort to diagnose where the problem is and a lot of money to fix it with a room treatment, new cables, component swap ect.... I'm not pro or con either way on this, but it would be nice to turn a knob or push a button rather than investing in new cables, speakers, or whatever to get the sound one may prefer.

If you go to a quality steak house type restaurant you'll always find salt and pepper on the table. The chefs cook the food to your specification, but as the eater you have the option to slightly season your meal. That's kinda' what well designed tone controls can do. They give you the ability to add (or subtract) some of tonal flavor to a recording.

Some people have mentioned using studio oriented EQs. If you want to explore along those lines I would strongly recommend "program" type EQs over standard graphic or parametric designs. The Manley is an all-tube, passive design. Another interesting design is the Dangerous Music Bax.

Kclone,
I understand where you are coming from. I also started down the same path: buying the most expensive components I could afford, changing to the latest cables which magazine reviewers claimed to be the best thing since sliced bread......and then all of the sudden I started taking notice of the kind of world I was living in: $4,000.00 "Power-cords", $90 fuses, resistance compensating speaker cables and all the snake oil marketing, which has no real basis or foundation in science and engineering; so possessing advance degrees in both physics and electrical engineering, I said to myself this is all nonsense. Surely we should be able to manipulate all spatial and the musical presentation's parameters through electrical means, signal-processing?????? I then dove deep into the mastering world and discovered that studios DO posses such tools, signal processors to manipulate every aspect of the playback's presentation. Unfortunately, there is no free lunch as the top quality mastering gear is also extremely expensive, but you get away from the "blind" audiophile exercises to "known", predictable, repeatable, defeat-able and scale-able exercises. Let's just say that it's a great world. Haven you ever stopped and wondered why a remastered version of a recording can accomplish so much more than component swaps, and certainly more than gold fuses and $5K power-cords? Just think of the K2, XRCD, XRCD2, XRCD24 and K2HD remasters. Don't you wish you could do the same for any recording at home? Again, this is not plug and play like the component, cable swapping merry-go-around, as it does require you to know what the knobs and switches actually do and what effect they have on the recording; analogous to "anybody can get behind the wheel of a formula-1 race car, but only some one who knows what he has in front of him and knows how to use it will get the most out of it.

Onhwy61's recommendations are a good place to start.

YEs, one way to look at it is that you are at the mercy of the engineers who use sophisticated processing devices to muck with the purity of the sound. You need tone (and dynamic range) controls in order to fight back! Our masters are heavily armed so maybe we should be also? Or we can just be sitting ducks. Kind of like guns and self defense.

Or on the other hand, maybe we should just dump the picture adjustments on our TVs as well! They add all kinds of clearly visible distortion!