Preamps ... no bass or treble control?

Most audiophiles don't use tone controls out of ignorance. Unless your music collection is comprised of perfectly recorded music, then at some point you'd be better off with some form of tone controls. Tone controls shouldn't be used to correct system or room problems, but to address problem recordings. I believe the audiophile prejudice against tone controls is a relic from the all analog days when added circuitry did add noise and otherwise distort the signal. I a digital environment that simple is no longer the case. Tone shaping/equalization can now be precisely applied without any deleterious artifacts. There's tons of great, but less than optimally recorded music out there. You can either not listen to it, listen to it and wince or enjoy it after twisting a knob. Your system should be a servant to your music collection, not the other way around.

As with all things audio, there are good an less good implementations of tone controls. Tact, Z-Systems and Drawmer make excellent digital tone controls/parametric EQs. Cello and McIntosh make very usuable analog tone controls.

Morbius, all active circuitry in some way distorts a signal passing through it, but there are orders of magnitude of distortion. DSP opens up a wide range of filters that practically speaking are not available in analog. My understanding is that some these filters exhibit far less ringing and other time domain distortions than typically used analog implemented filter type. Additionally, DSP allows a designer to chain filters together to compensate for the faults of a particular filter type. It sounds like a kludge, but if the processing power is there, why not use it. I'm not an engineer and I am regurgitating what I've been told by experienced audio engineers, so if I am totally off base, feel free to educate/correct me. Ultimately, the good sound trumps all and my direct experience indicates that some digital EQs sound far worst than others, which is also my experience with analog EQs.

Jw94055, why stop there? Eliminate your volume control! Seriously, a balance control is essential for dialing in soundstage info on some records. As with tone controls, a poorly designed one is pretty useless, but a well designed balance control can really bring the soundstage into focus.