They Don't Make 'em Like That Any More: Tone Controls

Love it, beyond the Baxandall I kinda sort miss just a single passive "tone" treble-cut control, often found on low-end cars like the '92 Tercel I drove into the ground. It's not the same as having bass/treble/loudness, but to boost bass you learn to turn up the overall volume and then take off enough treble so that it's bassier overall...same exact scheme as on a passive electric guitar/bass. Also, for any car with speakers in the trunk, fade toward the rear a little to boost the bass naturally.

I'm really a one knob per function kinda person when it comes to audio, and IMO burying digital tone controls in multi-level menus in cars is user-hostile and unsafe.

Modern equalizers on screen are most often parodies of the original they were designed from. How can you get excited about photorealism and shiny looking knobs and 'skins' when it's 'grab with grabber hand, hold mouse and lift or lower then drop' 30 times? Like a dumb child's simulation game.

I love EQs with many bands. In the real world I used to drag across the row of sliders with the knobs between two fingers setting a general curve during the first second of a song... in a single motion. Without looking. Graphic designers want rectangular EQ knobs. DJs want round ones. I wanted to manufacture round ones with spinnable outsides to max the speed of the curve-swipe.

If tone needs to be adjusted according to listening volume, why not have psychometric EQ that achieves that adjustment automatically?

Now that I'm pushing 60 it's clear my relative perception of tones has shifted somewhat. Although I've had no reason to have my hearing formally tested, as someone involved in video and audio production (as well as being a long-time home theater enthusiast), I have enough digital media samples with which I'm intimately familiar I can tell the sound I'm hearing has shifted from what it once was.

I've been thinking about trying one of those mobile phone apps which give you a test of different frequencies and then provides and EQ preset to correct signals (as much as possible). This seems like a good idea and conceptually no different than the hardware I use to create screen profiles for displays and the calibrated microphone I use to adjust my home theater. However, I haven't done it yet because so far I've yet to find any tool that discloses much technical detail about it's doing and how. Being familiar with high-end audio DSP processing from the production side, I'd like visibility into what it's doing so I can assess how much theoretical support and/or rigor there is behind it. Would love any suggestions...

People did not mention the "presence" button back in those days, either, as this article does not. It's seemingly a lot more forgotten than even a "loudness" button is.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presence_(amplification)

While I do like tone controls, I'm skeptical of the argument of adjusting bass/treble based on volume, e.g. the likes of 'Dynamic EQ' in D&M receivers. It has always sounded like it is doubling up something that my brain is already doing