Back in the 1980s, a friend and I took a wine appreciation class. Our class was small and already well experienced with wine. Our instructor worked at a winery and he thoroughly knew wine, bringing excellent examples, taking great care always to maintain a consistent vocabulary for describing wine, something woefully missing from audio practice.
   One day the instructor brought in a brown-bagged bottle of wine and poured us all a glass. We all sipped at once and we all gasped at once. We had just tasted Ripple-- or Thunderbird? -- or some other wino-favorite given to us as a reality test. Some choked and cursed; others immediately spat the wine out; but one us of us swallowed and smiled. He eagerly asked the name of the wine and then said that it was exactly the wine he had wanted to drink all along, but which he could never find. He marveled at the money he had wasted on fifty-dollar bottles of wine. He then stood, collected his things, and permanently left the class with his treasure. He knew what he liked and he did not care what anyone else thought. His heroic act inspires me even today. 

    Wait a minute. Isn't this more like making a musical instrument than engineering a strictly linear electrical circuit? Yes it is, but an analogy from photography and painting might help ease the thought of abandoning the objectively linear. Paint and canvas are not reality, not a woman sitting peacefully, nor a mountain reflecting a morning sun. Thus, for the artist to fool us into seeing reality, he must resort to techniques that overcome the seeing of just blotches of paint on cloth. When photography was invented it was assumed that reality had been perfectly captured. But the captured reality in photos often looked unreal, so photographers found that by borrowing some of the painter's techniques they could make photos "appear" closer to real.

Dream Line Stage
    So if I could have a dream linestage, besides the usual selector switch and volume control, it would have at least twelve sonic controls. Some of the controls already exist, such as phase and balance. But others, such as illumination, dynamics, rhythm, temperature, width, tone, texture, position, and depth, weight, do not exist, but should (we have a lot of work ahead of us). These extra controls would bring the sound from your speaker under your control and your entire music library could be pleasurably played. What then follows is a list of the controls and their functional extreme settings:

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