who wants tone controls on your next preamp?

I disagree. Let's say you have somebody in your room singing a song. Even if we all hear it differently we are all hearing the same thing. If you could record it and play it back so the exact same sound waves were produced (absolute sound) then we would all say we were hearing an exact copy even if we all heard it differently.

Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with altering the sound to suit personal taste, but it would be nice to start with an exact copy of the original.

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HErman,

That's fine but one can argue that that is not what you hear in reality with most recordings. You hear a transformed version that sounds the way the producer wants it to sound. The producer also had all kinds of gadgetry to use in order to get it to sound the way he wants.

If you think you can make it sound better, then tone controls, processors and such are the tools that enable that.

If.....

No doubt, every recording we have is an altered version of reality, an altered version of the absolute. That wasn't my point. My point was if we could reproduce the original sound exactly then hearing differences don't factor in.

The argument that was presented was that the pursuit of the absolute is pointless because we all hear differently. I say that makes no difference. If we hear the same source then even if we hear it differently we should be able to tell when it changes. Your absolute and mine may differ, our brains may interpret the sound of a trumpet being played in front of us in a different manner, but we should both be able to tell when the sound of that particular trumpet changes.

/.

This is not a hobby, for me; this is a way of life. I am in pursuit of the most celestial music any musician ever created, reproduced on the best equipment ever engineered without "Tone controls".

Herman,
That type of mental exercise is a little naive as the only ones who have that type of traceability to the original performance where those who were there. How many of your CD's/LP's have you been a witness to their original recording/performance? You are obviously not familiar with the recording process, mixing and the mastering process. How do you know that the microphones pickup the entire spectral spectrum and spatial cues? You owe it to yourself to get the Stereophile Test CD1, which has the pickup of many different microphones on the same live person/speaker being switched real-time; it will shed some light on the effects of the recording chain. Ideals are only that!