[stevehertz]

I've bought new hifi speakers and out of interest, and against my better judgement, I've just been looking at an audiophile forum to see the views of others. Never have I witnessed such a self identifying bunch of non-musical, non-technical, cerebrally deaf, full of audiophoolery catch phrases, bunch of phools in my life. One of the biggest things seems to be this infatuation with an amp having to 'match' a pair of speakers. Ok, basics aside like speaker impedance vs amp current capability, speaker sensitivity vs amp power capability (those are basic and a given) then what rubbish those guys talk about in terms of amps and speakers having to match. I mean, a 'bright' sounding amp needing to be paired with 'dark' speakers? most, even half decent amps have very straight frequency response curves so it's plain ridiculous. Also, if there wasn't this 'garlic to a vampire' attitude towards amps with tone controls, then many speaker and or room anomalies could at least be improved with a tad of judicious EQing. But of course, the great god 'signal' must be as pure as a mountain stream, and passing through tone controls will destroy valuable fidelity.. The fact that the signal has already passed through many and various forms of tone controls, graphic equalisers, compressors, limiters, noise reduction circuits, distorted valve amps etc etc is lost on them. And of course, no two studios have the same playback system and room acoustics, let alone the tonal and balance preference of those who mixed down the recording. So, each and every recording has a different sounding mix in terms of them being bright or dark, lacking in deep bass, whatever. What would go a long way towards sorting that out? tone controls. Most hifi speakers start to droop below, I dunno, say 100Hz. So personally, I always use a tad of bass boost to lift the low end response of the system in order for the bass to be heard as it was in the studio that had those massive monitors with their ground shaking low end capabilities. No tone controls? then you're stuck with a system that is always at the mercy of the recording studio in which a given recording was made, or the choices of the broadcaster in the case of radio.