Cary preamps....why no tone controls?

[JWJW]

Cary preamps look great. Just wonder why no tone controls?

[markjrho]

Good question. Perhaps because tube rolling would effectively change the tone/character of the sound, but that's just my guess. do you or anyone else have experience with the slp-03?

[Cyclotronguy]

Because years ago, audiophiles decided tone controls were evil..... then cable makers figured out how to incorporate baxandall circuits into wire.

And in truth they didn't track very well, channel to channel.

Cyclotronguy

[MrAcoustat]

Originally Posted by JWJW

Cary preamps look great. Just wonder why no tone controls?

Very simple you already have two tone controls in your system, your interconnects & speaker cables that should be enough.

[Amfibius]

They don't have tone controls because you don't need them If your system sounds unbalanced, there is a problem somewhere. You are better off fixing that problem than trying to compensate for it with a tone control.

[sibelius]

Whether right or wrong, the perception of tone controls as "midfi" pretty much wiped them out as an option for any products aspiring to the high end. I personally think it started as a reaction to all the mass produced integrated amps that started to come out of Asia (Denon, Onkyo, Sony).

As has been mentioned, system sound tweaking was now left to changing out IC's, speaker cable and power cords. That's when we began to see the ever escalating prices of these components.

[Amfibius]

I think any tone controls at all are a bad idea. The reason: tone controls are very rough tools. What exactly do they mean by increase "treble" or "bass"? What frequencies are involved? Suppose your preamp boosts all frequencies above 1000Hz when you operate the treble tone control. What if your system has a dip from only 2000Hz and above? This means that you are correcting frequencies from 2kHz up, but introducing a dip by the same amount between 1kHz and 2kHz.

If your system has frequency response aberrations as severe as these, your solution lies elsewhere. You need something which will provide much more fine control, or you need to find out if other factors (e.g room reflections or badly coloured components) are contributing.

[HiFiGuy528]

I don't really mind it. My SPL-98 is pretty good.

[GaryProtein]

Tone controls are necessary because they can help make recordings sound better. They are not a cure all, but they help.

Not all recordings, even of great performances sound good out of the box, and it has nothing to do with whether your system is balanced or not.

Using a cable as a tone control seems silly to me.

[JWJW]

Originally Posted by GaryProtein

Tone controls are necessary because they can help make recordings sound better. They are not a cure all, but they help.

Not all recordings, even of great performances sound good out of the box, and it has nothing to do with whether your system is balanced or not.

Using a cable as a tone control seems silly to me.

I agree with you.