Hi Guys: Following on from the thread “Balance control - a necessary evil or just sensible” Are tone controls a necessary evil. Having recently acquired and cleaned up and old QUAD 34 preamp I have become re-acquainted with tone control and filter functionality.
I regularly listen to historic recordings, older LP’s and CD transcriptions from older recordings. For these music sources, I find the tone benders invaluable for cleaning up and adjusting the final sound quality. I also find many modern recordings have less than perfect mastering, a little judicious adjusting can clean up the final presentation.
Many of the pre-amps and integrated amps from the 70,s had extensive and overly complex bass, midrange and treble controls, and most with switchable corner frequencies. I can understand how this level of complexity could get in the way of the signal and perhaps effect overall sound quality. Nevertheless I also find the simplicity, carefully considered design and layout of the QUAD tone control and filtering (and others like it) to offer a very high level of flexibility without impinging on the sound quality. What are you thoughts?
