erik,
I sometimes use my old Eico HF-81 integrated tube amp and I quite enjoy using the tone controls. I don't go adjusting them for every recording of course as that level of fiddling would for me suck the joy out of music listening. But it's nice to have them to tweak the sound a bit.
Of course, agreed about your thoughts on cables.
As I've mentioned often on the subject: I have auditioned many of the latest, greatest speakers in the under 20K range, all of them hooked up via highly lauded audiophile interconnects, speaker cables, attached to sources with high end AC cabling...all of that. And yet I find I get essentially just as stellar sound quality at home, with all the detail and naturalness, and a "shock guests" quality of realism. How in the world could this be possible using bog-standard cables so dismissed by the cable-elitists?
As you say: paying attention to the things that matter most; good speakers, careful speaker positioning, good room acoustics, etc.I find it much more rewarding, not to mention financially satisfying, than spending thousands of dollars trying to find wires to act as tone controls.