Tone controls vanished from serious audio equipment around 1975, and our hobby has been quietly arguing about it ever since.

The purist argument goes something like this: every component in the signal path adds something. A filter circuit, even a well-designed one, changes the signal in ways you might not want. The goal of absolute transparency meant removing everything that wasn't strictly necessary. That thinking produced some genuinely excellent preamplifiers and helped move serious audio away from the feature-laden consumer receiver aesthetic.

But the problem those tone controls were trying to solve never went away: music isn't delivered in a neutral room, through neutral speakers, to neutral ears.

The irony is that today we cheerfully accept a far heavier hand. A DSP room correction system makes more aggressive changes to the signal than any simple tone control ever did, and the audiophile community has largely embraced it as progress—which it often is.

I don't think a return to tone controls is the answer. But neither do I think all this fancy DSP business is the best medicine for a system that isn't right overall. Targeted fixes—taming a poor recording, say—are part of the right answer. Whole-system correction usually isn't.

We tend to overreact to problems when simpler solutions would serve us better: better speakers, better electronics, a better room. That's not as easy as turning a knob or pushing a button. It just works.