Equalizer in a Hi Fi system

Miro, I couldn’t agree more with you. Again, we are kindred souls. Totally agree that most audiophiles have NO IDEA how good a quality treble shelf or broad bell can sound. How well it can integrate with the music and not draw attention to itself and truly open up , beatify, and breathe air and life into a flat or dull record on hifi gear. Why do few know this?  It’s because like you said there are so many poor implementations of bass and treble tone control. You have to go out of your way to find it. Which you and I have. And we’re rewarded in spades!

@tattooedtrackman , if that 10K switch is properly implemented you should find benefit out of occasionally boosting it for some records. If you don’t and it’s always flat of cut, then McIntosh didn’t implement it well. Eg too broad a Q hence pulling undesirable frequencies up too, for example. Its center point is too low, so likely tge Q would be narrow and may not sound that natural and good to boost. You never know though. I’ve got a 10K switch in my car stereo that I boost usefully often. I you have hi fi gear, which clearly you do, not sure why you’d ever cut at 10K. Unless a record is unusually bright. I don’t know. Guess I’m a quality bass and treble lover. Adds EXCITEMENT and life. I’m at zero to +3 db for excellent recordings but can be as high as +8 for dull or bass less recordings, usually older. 

@tlcocks 

The Chord Mojo 2 is a cute little DAC/headphone amp. The fastest it can go is 756/32. The Artix 7 field programmable gated array processor is trick in this application because it requires very little power. A 64 bit Floating point processor would roast that little unit alive. You might even burn your hand. It is nowhere near as powerful as a Trinnov Amethyst or the DEQX Pre 8. I hate headphones by the way. I do not like the way the music is presented. It is very unnatural. It is interesting to note that people with the very best systems do not use headphones. I should also note that people who live in apartment buildings might have no choice. I've been there and hated it, I suspect my neighbors also hated me😈 

In short, comparing something like the Chord Mojo 2 to an Amethyst or Pre 8 is folly at best. The best comparison to the Mojo would be the MiniDSP SHD another 32 bit device. 

The Amethyst and DEQX Pre 8 are full function preamps. Both even have phono stages. Both use 64 bit floating point processors so degradation at low volumes is insignificant. This is extremely important for processors that are being used to adjust volume levels at various frequencies. 

@jacobsdad2000 

Room acoustics are very important and most rooms require some sort of management depending on the type of speaker used. 

Room control is a misnomer. It is really speaker control. It repairs and adjusts things that are totally immune to room management like group delays and the variations in frequency response between the two channels. Then there is making the system sound the way you want it to. I boost bass below 100 Hz and attenuate frequencies above 1000 Hz. I have my own "house" curve. I also have a high volume curve which flattens the bass and reduces treble even further. People never realize how loud the system is playing until they try to talk. 

I hate headphones by the way. I do not like the way the music is presented. It is very unnatural. It is interesting to note that people with the very best systems do not use headphones. I should also note that people who live in apartment buildings might have no choice. I’ve been there and hated it, I suspect my neighbors also hated me😈

I dont like headphone too ... Save my AKG K340 modified and optimized the only one hybrid design ever working for 45 years ...It is like owning a set of speakers with subs... If the recording is good the sound create an out of the head experience and the timbre is completely natural which 2 aspects were not at all in any of the other headphones i used in my life ...And anyway with the BACCH filters the headphone experience will not be far behind the speakers experience ...The K340 give me a bit of it already with his 2 innovative technologies inside the complex shell chambers ...

Room acoustics are very important and most rooms require some sort of management depending on the type of speaker used.

Room control is a misnomer. It is really speaker control. It repairs and adjusts things that are totally immune to room management like group delays and the variations in frequency response between the two channels. Then there is making the system sound the way you want it to.

First acoustics is way more than just room acoustic controls , especially more than room acoustic thought by the average consumers ...

Room control is not a misnomer , because it is not to be confused with the speaker control ... You forgot that the room could be transformed optimally in his acoustic content with not only diffusive surface and reflecting or absorbing one but also with Helmholtz tuned resonators distributed on specific pressure zone and you forgot that we can modify the geometry and modify the topology related to some specific chosen gear and listener position ...This is room controls ...It serve not only the speakers specs by optimizing them but the Ears/ head/ brain location ...

Dont forget that the ears/brain live in his own non linear time domain in a room and this time domain concrete territory is not exactly the same as the linear one of the Fourier mapping ... The ears/brain dont obey Fourier laws but infringe on them as revealed by their own workings when measured ...Room acoustic controls and equalization controls go then together, ONE DO NOT REPLACE THE OTHER ....But even these two are not enough ... we need more controls than speakers and room controls ...

And room control implicate even some DSP as the Choueiri BACCH filters which cannot replace room control but can optimize it from specific listener position and his mandatory inner ears and HTRF measures ... Any stereo system is FLAWED... Not because the speakers are flawed or the room is flawed but because one aspect of any stereo speakers is UNCONTROLLED : crosstalk ... This crosstalk between the two speakers impede all spatial acoustic information transmission for the two ears/brain of the listener in his specific ideal position as measured in room acoustic control ... The BACCH filters work correcting not the speakers control but the relation between speaker controls and room controls and listener location ...

Then all is not in the world as your obsession with one form of  equalization dictate, the one you bought 😁 ... Room controls exist ( mechanical equalization with tuned distributed resonators among other devices ) as exist speakers controls with EQ and as exist some DSP as the BACCH filters correcting the relation between the speakers and the room various controls and the listener ears/brain location and dimensions ...

I'm very happy for you too!Your first impressions have me researching EQ options more seriously now. There's only so much that can be practically done to fix my room.Thank you for posting.