Quote Originally Posted by N. Abstentia
No, I don't use tone controls. They add too much noise to the signal path, and I won't buy a preamp that does not have defeatable tone controls.

RIAA phono EQ? I thought that RIAA thing was just a phono preamp that allows you to hook a turntable up to any RCA input? Did I misunderstand that one?

Tape deck..gave up on cassettes in 1991.

Auditorium tweaking..well I don't live in an auditorium so I don't need that.

Speaker placement..when done right you won't need an EQ. If you think you need an EQ to fix sound problems, you have either crappy speakers, don't have them set up right, or your room is not properly damped.
Well, of course a phone preamp is used so you can hook up a phono cartridge on a tone arm mounted to a turntable. But why is this needed? Well, I'll tell you. First of all, phono cartridges have quite low levels of outputs, which is measured in millivolts. So a phono preamp has to raise up the signal level to line level (tape, aux, CD inputs).

Second, dragging record past a stylus is an inherently noisy process. Anyway, in the mastering process, EQ is applied to the signal to raise up the highs and reduce the bass. Hook up your turntable to a line level input like a Tape or Auxiliary input, and you will not only find it quite low in level but rather screechy. So, on playback, the phono preamp applies reverse EQ to cut down those highs and make the response more or less flat and a lot more mellow! So, you see, phono playback does involve EQ both in recording and playback. There used to be a number of different EQ curves, but the RIAA one became the standard one.

Ahhh, the young! They just lack experience in a lot of things. . . .