I will be including this circuit in my valve preamplifier, which is intended as a MC, MM, TAPE HEAD, and DAC control unit. Notwithstanding the arguments about the advisability of tone controls on a piece of high-end hifi gear, the fact of life is that our human hearing is more sensitive to mid-range frequencies at low listening levels. A commercial manufacturer included this control, and it is indeed a useful addition. Good enough for me.
Oh, I'll have to wipe my glasses again!
Best regards!
..but still I'm not going to open that thing again to check at which angle the taps are!
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Firstly, nobody knew about Fletcher-Munson curves when pianos and orchestras were invented!
Secondly, of course the sound of a piano (or orchestra) changes when playing quietly, because of Fletcher-Munson effects in the human ear. But through a lifetime of exposure, we have come to expect this as the natural sound of the instrument; thunderous bass from a pianissimo section of the music would sound ridiculous and wrong! We expect the bass to be diminished when the instrument is played quietly.
It is something else entirely when an orchestra playing a fortissimo section of the music sounds thin and weedy, because you are playing it back at home at an SPL 30 dB lower than the concert hall. Again, through a lifetime of experience, we know that an orchestra playing fortissimo should have thunderous bass. If that's missing, it sounds wrong.
And that's why the loudness control was invented, to attempt to at least partially compensate for this effect. No, it was not a clever marketing trick to confuse the public. As anyone with functioning ears can tell, it is based on a very real phenomenon. As anyone capable of interpreting a graphical display of the Fletcher-Munson contours can see, it is not only real, it has solid scientific backing, and is very well quantified.
Still not convinced? Got to your local zoo, stand near the lion cage, wait until the lion roars. Experience the panic, raised heartbeat, rib-rattling fearsomeness. Now go home and play back a sound clip of a lion roaring, this time at library-quiet 45 dB SPL. Does the roar sound the same to you? Does it have the same emotional impact? Does it have the same bass-midrange balance as the roar you heard live?
Electric guitarists struggle with this problem all the time - it's one of the reasons why speaker attenuators (to reduce guitar amp volume) are often accused of changing the sound of the instrument. When you lower the (ear-damagingly loud) 110 dB SPL of your guitar on stage to an apartment-friendly 65 dB, the bass appears to evaporate, and the attenuator gets blamed, when in fact the Fletcher-Munson characteristics of the guitarist's ears are a big part of the problem.
There are many utterly idiotic beliefs that have sprung up in the field of home audio reproduction in the last couple of decades, and one of the most idiotic is the idea that tone controls (and / or loudness controls) should be removed. Pure idiocy, when anyone with functioning hearing can hear enormous changes in spectral balance between one recording and another, or one living room and another, and if you have bad speakers, one speaker and another.
-Gnobuddy
Experience also tells you to expect less bass out of your STEREO when it is turned down, for the same reason you hear less bass when you hear an orchestra at a distance. Anything else is changing the tonal balance. Audiophiles just don’t like to admit that they like the bass boosted (especially if it is turned down). There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it walks like a duck quacks and likes water. At rock concerts and festivals, they sound guy often tunes the system to have the proper bass impact 100 to 500 feet out. They do this by running the subs 10 oe even 20 dB hiot. It sounds like it has too much bass in the good seats because it does.
Off topic, I experienced this up close a few months ago in a reserve near the Kruger Park. We were in an open game drive vehicle about 10 metres away from a group of 4 big male lions (very unusual!). They looked very impressive, lying around not doing much more than scratch their balls. Then they all started roaring. I tell you that tapped straight into something deep and primal in the monkey brain! I'm sure spectral analysis of the lion roar will show a strong component of the fabled brown note
I have a Yamaha RX-380, a thrift-store find I paid around $20 for a couple of years ago. It's now hooked up to both our living-room TV and my computer, so we listen to it every day.
The loudness control works normally over most of its range, but if turned all the way to one extreme, one channel sounds obviously wrong. I'm sure this is not how Yamaha engineered it to sound!
Considering the age of the components, it seems likely that either the loudness pot, or one of the associated small components, is now defective. So, unfortunately, I'm not helping you in your quest to compare Denon and Yamaha loudness controls.
This was our "bedroom amp" before it moved to the living room, and at the much lower bedroom listening levels, I did use the loudness control, mostly in a "set and forget" way to provide subjectively the proper spectral balance using a few familiar music CDs.
-Gnobuddy
I know exactly what you mean. I've experienced something similar a few times - with only one lion each time, but it was more than enough!
The lion roars, and in an instant I am profoundly and completely aware just where I belong on the food chain, and where the lion belongs - I'm breakfast, and nothing more. Every cell in my entire body wants to run away screaming. It takes an effort of will to turn my conscious brain back on and remember that there are bars between us.
Evolution did a good job, wiring our ancestral brains to have absolutely no doubt what it means when a lion roars nearby!
-Gnobuddy
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