Gonna break my rule. One post only. No follow ups. Actually I am only writing this for third party readers to see what's really going on.
O general reader, let's look at the full paragraph from which the above in bold was cherry-picked:
If a "target' curve has been achieved, and the sound quality is not satisfactory, the suggestion is often to go into the menu, find the manual adjustment routine, and play around with the shape of the curve until you or your customer like the sound. This is not a calibration. This is a subjective exercise in manipulating an elaborate tone control. Once set it is fixed, and in it will be reflected timbral features of the music being listened to at the time. In other words, the circle of confusion is now included in the system setup. By all means do it, but do not think that the exercise has been a "calibration". Old fashioned bass & treble tone controls and modern "tilt" controls are the answer and they can be changed at will to compensate for personal taste and excesses or deficiencies in recordings. Sadly, many "high end" products do not have tone controls - dumb. It is assumed that recordings are universally "perfect" - wrong!
Read the first line above (and
further back as needed). This is describing the situation where the consumer has blundered, and used his Auto Room Correction in his AVR to do full-range correction,
and made things worse. Specifically, "the sound quality is not satisfactory". So you don't like the sound (because you have stuffed up), so Toole says
don't try to fix it by 'playing around with the shape of the target in-room curve' when listening to a recording, because then
that one recording will be built into your fixed deep-menu settings, and you will now have recording-dependent satisfactoriness all the time. So a tone control would be your best option here, having stuffed up, because you are going to have to do it all the time if you use a music recording then try to 'do something about it'.
But when someone is setting up their system
the right way, he
says this: "
Tone controls are still a requirement to compensate for occasional excesses and failings of recordings." That's it. Do things right, and you would then use a tone control
for that purpose.
You can see now who has been twisting things.
Again with the errors of omission. Again, here is the whole paragraph:
Setting up a system according to personal preferences in spectral balance includes the circle of confusion and therefore generalization to all programs is not possible. Depending on the shortcomings in your loudspeakers and room results can vary. Better to have easily accessible tone controls that can be instantly adapted to your personal preference - for any program.
The first sentence is actually saying it isn't possible to use personal preferences in spectral balance to set up your system after Auto Room Correction (again...), because the result will be stuffed up by other variables and too inconsistent.
Read the whole
link to AVS where the quote was taken: Toole was responding to someone who literally said, "I don't mind having to rely on personal preference when it comes to adjusting the frequency response post auto room correction". And he (Toole) wasn't happy with that idea. He wanted to say something very specific and conditional: IF you are going to misuse auto room correction, and then tweak the mess to taste afterwards with EQ... then
of the two options for doing the tweaking, either in the room correction software or with a much-more-accessible tone control, then he would suggest the tone control as the least-worst of those two, because you are going to be doing it all the time...for all recordings (ie "for any program"). In other words, this is Toole describing
exactly the same situation as we found in the first quote that I dealt with above, again misrepresented with the same missing context.
And the last sentence, where Matt thinks he has a 'gotcha' and highlights "for ANY program"... that's just Toole reintroducing the variable of recording quality...
exactly what I always say Toole advocates in the use of tone controls. So even the 'gotcha' is a misrepresentation. Is it deliberate? Who knows: maybe it's just miscomprehension.
I hope the reader can see what is happening. I repeatedly try to include the context and conditions, for example saying the research
does indeed suggest we tweak for personal preference...
in the level of the bass output. But Matt is more into misrepresenting anyone anywhere: a most recent example in the page above this one, when antcollinet said that some of us might be using a tone control "adjusting the tone of particular recordings that may have been recorded bright or dull." (in other words, specifically for bad recordings), Matt twisted it into "In other words adjusting to personal taste." (oh, suddenly it's not about bad recordings any more? Suddenly it is not about correcting something like a bright or dull recording, but 'to taste'? Deliberate misrepresentation). IMHO it is just not a good look.
I am not going to play into that way of 'discussing' things. I am just going to correct it. Once. Job done. (You can see why I have a policy, hey! What a mess.)