Audiophiles! Treble, Bass, and Surround knobs question

Factual Questions
1

Hey guys,

In every stereo system I’ve encountered, there are always knobs that say “Treble”, “Bass”, and “Surround” (maybe the third one’s not as common… but I digress)…

Ten times out of ten, the knobs are always smack-dab in the middle… never +10 or -10, or if they’re analog knobs, they’re always set in the middle, where there’s a groove to indicate “0”.

My question is… why is “0” the default setting? If we could max out the bass, treble, and surround outputs, wouldn’t that make whatever comes out the business end that much better?

Is there some sort of damage that I could do by maxing out the knobs?

2

Almost by definition, Audiophiles want their sound reproduction to be as natural as possible. Maxing out the bass or treble is a sure way to get your audio system to sound as natural as a lowrider car playing hip-hop. If you have to use the knobs very much, it usually means that there is a serious problem in your speakers or your room. Still, bass boost can be useful if used in moderation - if the sound starts getting “boomy” you’ve gone too far.

Generally, modern amps are protected against damage from overdriving, but if you have small speakers, it’s possible to burn out (or bottom out) a voice coil by too much bass emphasis.

3

This is pretty much it. Use the knobs if you have to to compensate for some other inadequacy in your system, don’t just crank the bass and exclaim it sounds awesome. (Hint: it doesn’t).

With bass in particular, a lot of the characteristics (boomy, not enough boomy?) can be changed by repositioning the speaker in relation to the surrounding walls. Don’t shove your speakers into corners, they’ll sound like shit there.

I spent a lot of time moving my living room around to get the sound I wanted (and that I knew the speakers were capable of.)

4

True* audiophile systems don’t have distortion knobs on.

*True in the “no true Scotsman…” sense of the word.

5

Not sure how common it is, but my Sony receiver (not audiophile at all) has a switch that is supposed to bypass all of the tone circuitry.

6

I think most knobs that have numbers on them are calibrated in dB, and the numbers indicate how many dB that region of the audio spectrum gets boosted. Zero means leave it unchanged.

Setting the bass and treble to max would just mean that you’re making the highs and lows louder w/ respect to the midrange. The adjustments are meant to compensate for your speakers’ frequency response, but people use them to tune the music to how they like to hear it.

7

Sorry, wrong thread.

8

Sound has a whole range of frequencies, which if you want to lump into only 3 categories is bass, midrange, and treble. As CurtC said, when you change the bass and treble you are boosting or cutting them with respect to the midrange, which is left unchanged. So, if you boost the bass and the treble, you are effectively increasing the overall volume but cutting the midrange. It’s not the same as just cranking up the volume.

There are several reasons to boost or cut the treble and midrange. One is what CurtC said, to compensate for your speakers. If you’ve got itty bitty speakers chances are they just can’t push enough air to have a good bass response, especially at higher power levels. So, you can make up for their inadequacies by boosting the bass. Or, maybe you have monster cheapy speakers, which are huge but just stink on high end frequency response. So, you boost the treble to compensate for it.

A second reason to change it is to compensate for the fact that your hearing isn’t linear. At low volume levels you don’t hear the frequency extremes as well. Some stereos have a “loudness” button that you can push which boost the highs and the lows, and it is intended to be used at low volumes. If you don’t have a loudness button you can crank up the bass and treble at low volumes to do the same thing.

A third reason to change it is just personal preference. Some people like a big booming bass. Makes them feel like they are in a dance club or something, I dunno.

Tone bypass switches are typically only found on higher end systems. It’s so they can get a really flat frequency response when they do lab testing (makes the published specs look better). From a practical matter your ear probably can’t hear the difference.

Bass and treble are fairly crude controls and often modify frequencies that you don’t want to modify. For example, if you’ve got cheapy speakers they may do ok for most of the bass and treble range but may not work so well at the extremes. With bass and treble knobs you can kinda compensate for this, but you end up boosting some frequencies that the speakers do respond to ok as well as boosting the frequencies that they don’t respond to ok. This is why graphic equalizers were invented. Instead of just 2 controls (or 3 if your stereo has a midrange knob) you separate the audio spectrum into 10 or 12 bands (or however many bands the equalizer has) which gives you finer control.

Maxing out the knobs increases the volume for those frequencies. If your stereo system is designed properly you should be able to max out the knobs and crank the volume all the way to 10 (or 11 if you are Nigel) and not do any damage.

9

Another reason not to crank the knobs way up is that it’s possible for the input signal to the speakers to exceed the speakers output capabilities. This will result in “clipping” the waveform sent from the amplifier to the speakers.

10

Or you could just set the knobs to whatever makes you happy. You could leave them alone and be less happy and call yourself an audiophile, too. That’s always fun.
I am kinda serious, but mean no harm to the audiophiles…if such a group even exists.

11

What is the audiophile opinion of digital receivers that let you change the sound of the room, “concert hall”, “club”, “theater”, etc.?

12

I have a Yamaha amp that does this. Almost without exception, I find the surround effects to be obvious and intrusive. There are a very few songs where setting the amp to it’s most subtle effect (“small club”) can really give a sense of presence. One such song is 33 rpm Soul by Michelle Shocked, which sounds incredible with a little surround turned on. Usually, I just leave the effects off.

13

I’ve never seen “Surround”. Maybe you mean “Balance”?

I’ve got hundreds of CDs, but curiously only one of them even references treble and bass settings: the liner notes for Nirvana’s In Utero contains a diagram showing suggested bass and trebble knob settings. Does anyone know why the album would have been mastered in such a way that it requires or encourages listeners to reconfigure their stereo equipment? Are such bass and treble setting recommendations common in particular types of recorded music, or in a particular era?

14

In case anyone is wondering what I’m talking about, here’s a forum post which includes a scan of the relevant portion of the liner notes and a short discussion:http://www.hometheatershack.com/forums/home-theater-audio-video-news/3932-nirvana-utero-cd-liner-notes-reveal-tone-control-easter-egg.html

15

Many thanks for everybody who has contributed to my question :slight_smile:

I figured that that was what was going on with the distortion knobs. At least now I know what to call them.

In any case, it seems fairly prevalent around here that somebody will walk up to a receiver/amp, fiddle with the knobs, and invariably turn up the bass, in an attempt to act like an “audiophile”.