I do not recall this being a feature.

You might be getting it mixed up with the re-seed feature. This was a button you could press that would re-seed the random features of the visual, changing (for example) the amount of "trails" that appear on a given visual with blurry trails.

I forget which button this was, take a peek at the button guide to find it. Perhaps after a few presses, funnelweb will look the way you remembered it to look.