rodH: Depending on your age, you may be experiencing something similar to what happened to me. As I've entered my senior years I have become uncomfortably sensitive to upper frequencies in the range or around 2K to 10K hz.
I agree that listening position, speaker placement, and room acoustics should first be done to allow the system to perform as designed, however, with all due respect to individual tastes and opinions, I'll never understand folks who refuse to have or use tone/EQ controls in their system, especially those insisting on hearing the music as it was 'intended'. I doubt any of us could ever know unless we were present during final mastering.
After all, every system and room sounds different, and we all know speakers sound significantly different, even within the same brand, so which system, room, or speakers are successfully projecting the music as intended?
Although a strong advocate for tone/EQ adjustments when beneficial, I have my system and room dialed in well enough so that any EQ adjustments are rarely needed, but this can never correct those occasional recordings that are either poor or not EQ'd during final engineering to suite my personal preference. I mean without EQ controls what do you do for a particularly bright recording, or one with an overly dominant bottom end? I have a few such albums, and some which are otherwise excellent recordings.
Engaging the tone/EQ controls will of course lengthen the signal path, and although almost imperceptible, will add a degree of distortion; but the potential benefits can outweigh any suspected reduction in signal quality if applied judiciously where and when appropriate.
My only complaint of McIntosh tone and multi-band EQ's are their range of +/- 12 db. I seriously doubt anyone should ever need such extreme range. If Mc made them to be no more than +/- 6 db within the same rotational arc of 7 to 5 O'clock, it would be much easier to make minute adjustments. It's especially difficult since most of my adjustments are no more than the smallest amount off center detent, which risks the knob snapping back to detent after I sit down.
In my humble opinion, an adjustment of no more than +/- 1 minute on the rotational clock is all that is needed to improve a suspect recording; any more and you risk damaging the natural presentation of the performance.
Ok I'm done
