Question Tone controls

[Barnaby]

I'm coming to believe this trend to remove treble and bass and balance buttons a few years back was simply a con to make the hifi industry a huge amount of money. I haven't compared these but all of this talk of particular amps sounding warm or clinical etc surely could have been resolved by turning a button a few mm? Does anyone agree. I mean I appreciate there might be theoretical distortion or whatever but surely that's what the "analogue sound" is all about? Anyone agree?

 

[Al ears]

I'm coming to believe this trend to remove treble and bass and balance buttons a few years back was simply a con to make the hifi industry a huge amount of money. I haven't compared these but all of this talk of particular amps sounding warm or clinical etc surely could have been resolved by turning a button a few mm? Does anyone agree. I mean I appreciate there might be theoretical distortion or whatever but surely that's what the "analogue sound" is all about? Anyone agree?

No, not really.
However, I do, in my later years, prefer the inclusion of a balance control and find that if you do need tone controls you've bought the wrong amp / speaker combo......
NOTE: there is already a Tone Controls thread going that was started in 2022.

 

[nopiano]

It’s a while since I used tone controls at home. In the car, or with an Amazon Echo, or a TV soundbar, you can indeed tame boominess or enhance vocals. The snag is traditional bass and treble controls on Hifi offered excessive boost or cut, across a vast range of frequencies. Ideally, one needs finer and narrower tweaks, hence today DSP or room correction systems are popular.

Unfortunately, many standard tone controls weren’t necessarily flat when set to zero, hence the bypass button was invented. That’s an ideal option, but many - me included - would rarely bother! However, a few newer designs do offer tone controls, as well as classic designs like Luxman always have.

 

[Vincent Kars]

to remove treble and bass and balance buttons a few years back

Really?
In the 80's the HiFi people uses graphic equalizers.
The Audiophiles insisted on removing tone control, balance as this of course was tampering with sound quality. Less is More!

Today you won't have something as primitive as tone control. You use EQ or DRC (Digital Room Correction). You do so in the digital domain, not in the analog domain. Better use DSP!