who wants tone controls on your next preamp?

Just a naive (i.e., McIntosh devotee/musician for 5 decades or so) lurker here. It's interesting to me that the purists want to give control over the music to the 19 year old studio intern who sets up the microphone, and are willing to spend ever-increasing amounts of money to achieve perfect reproduction of whatever result emerges. One possible interpretation is that if you are spending a sizable chunk of your income on something like this, it pretty much has to become Communing With The Gods for you. I'm wondering how much of this point of view would survive a serious study of what happens to the sound in its trip from the instrument to the audiophile ear.

Mcphersn - nobody wants 19 year old intern to affect recorded sound. The difference here is that the only think I can do about it is to select good recordings.

I want to have system as transparent and neutral as possible to avoid further damage.

Nature of recording deficiency is more complicated than treble and bass. Adjusting bass and treble affects whole harmonic structure and can make more harm than good. Additional stages containing capacitors reduce transparency. Less is more.

It is interesting that with cheap amp and speakers nothing sounded right and I had to adjust tone all the time. With good amp and very good speakers I don't have any desire to adjust. I don't need tone controls and don't want to pay for them. Fortunately most of high end amps don't have it. If you feel you need them - that's fine. There is no right or wrong here.

If they're great tone controls, absolutely. Good IC's and cables are important. I see the relationship between hyped cables and lack of tonal controls. We'll all hear the true breakthroughs. I remember nearly all analog systems had tone controls. They included them to allow user preference to improve the tonal qualities of the recordings based on the music system and the home environment. On 10 different, perfectly matched, flat reference systems, the same disk will sound different.

I feel digital tone control corrections may best be done like this: Properly set-up high quality, matched reference components. To get a linear musical response, a digital calibration unit like the Behringer 2496 can calibrate your system to the room, and save your preset curves.

The real problem is next. Preset curves are good, but not like having additional control from CD to CD. What would possibly be best is a additional 5-frequency tonal control like the Cello Palette. It's dialed in completley by ear for each CD. 5 dials adjusts tones from 20-20K Hz from 0-6 dB (mids) or 0-12 dB (lows and highs) increments together in both left and right channels.

This additonal control was designed to correct and improve, after the set-up/room calibration, the various lackluster digital mixing issues from CD to CD.

It allows dialing in the most musical playback quality from one music system to the next, plus addresses environmental issues. I'm very surprised that nice tonal control units allowing CD to CD mixing adjustments haven't followed the Palette and fourished. They'd simply go between digital transports and preamps.

If some readers may know of any components similiar to the Palette, please respond.

By tone control, it is easy to adjust treble and brass level to my favour. I understood many hi-end users will not like this method because tone control like a additive to music and not really "sound direct'. They like using cable/power cord/DAS to change the tone w/ so much money.

I like tone control and many big brand equipped with it. such as Marzantz, Luxman & McIntosh and many many.

Just for sharing

Parasound P7 has tone controls on remote. Bass management too if you're using subs.