[Joe Bloggs]

Whenever I mention the word 'equalizer' everyone seems to flee like it's a plague or something. I quote myself--this is part of my post that killed the iPod discussion

Quote:

No need to be sorry The way I use an EQ is to rip the CD to wav, process the wav with digital EQ and crossfeed, and burn the processed wav back onto CD. This way I get to use digital EQ with any and all my systems, which, by the way, all have no EQ It's not quite convenient, but so far my most revelatory audio experiences have been through headphones listening to CDs tailored for that headphone I doubt this will change even if I throw big bucks to upgrade my equipment. Even the most expensive headphones out there have irregularities all over the place. Besides, to ask headphone designers to make a headphone with flat frequency response if hard enough--asking them to design a headphone that would also fit the way acoustics change from loudspeaker to headphone source is plain impossible!

Well isn't it true? Half the time when I see complaints about headphones/amps/source components it's 'too bright', 'too warm', 'too dark', 'not enough bass', 'too much bass', etc. etc., ad nauseum

Wouldn't a good quality / digital EQ be the most obvious solution to these problems? Instead what everyone does here is buy one headphone after another, one amp after another, one source after another until they find a good 'match'--bright-sounding earphones compensated for by warm amps and sources, vice versa, or whatever. (of course, there are other considerations when buying more amps and sources, but tonal balance covers a not insignificant proportion of complaints even in this department.)

To me this sounds plain crazy

 

[KShaft]

for the longest time i thought the same thing.
why not just equalize?
if it sounds better, it um sounds better? right?
well thing is being audio enthusists or outright audiophiles we are some what of a purist bunch. we want the least crap interfering from source to amp. no black boxes inbetween. nothing but pure signal.
coloration is just a part of life with most headphones, or audio equipment in general. so why not color the signal??
well i cant give you any scientific reason sort to speak, but i want to hear everything naturaly.
i can make senns sound like beyers, but what good is that?
i want to hear the natrual reproduction of the cd with my equipment, whatever that may be. not an equalizer which has no purpose BUT to change the signal which ultimately degrades it in small ways.
now perhaps i could see small changes here or there with say a marsh pre-amp or equalizer, but as for anything else i wouldnt touch it. radical changes will make the phones perform in ways its not supposed to, and it just wont sound right.
let me just put it this way, although ive never owned a high quality eq, ive never been able to equalize a poor recording into a good one. did i make it more listenable, oh sure, but the signal from the source is the most important thing, and that starts with the guys engineering the cd (or whatever) in the first place.
perhaps its more mental than anything, because everything colors the signal in some way. perhaps its just adding an unescesary thing in the signal path. im no longer a fan of it, but i cant say that it doesnt have its merits.
k.s.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

I suppose analog EQ's do mess up the sound somewhat. But I've heard nothing but good things from my digital EQ. And it doesn't 'add a black box' between the source and the output. Rather, it changes / optimises the source to allow it to sustain the distortions of the output path... without getting so distorted!

I don't think of my digital EQ as distortion. If I were forced to think of it in such terms, I'd say that it distorts the signal so that after the output path distorts it again, it comes out correct!

And I have a gut feeling that digital crossfeed is cleaner than analog too

 

[morphsci]

Joe,

That is why people usually use several different phones. For me my time is more valuable than the cost of a pair of headphones. Therefore, I am not going to take the time to rip a reequalized CD when I could better spend the time actually listening to it on a pair of cans that I think are better suited to the music for me. That is my opinion and I firmly believe in different sytrokes for different folks. Your method seems very well thought out and if it works for you that is all that really matters. I also thank you for sharing your experiences as that is what this board is all about

 

[dhwilkin]

morphsci nailed it, time is valuable. Good-quality EQ is fine w/ me, but as picky as I am once I start doing a project, I'd never get all my CDs EQed just the way I wanted in any reasonable amount of time. So it's just a matter of convenience for me. Hehe, maybe you should start a business that digitally EQs CDs for people too busy to do it themselves, like me.

 

[davidcotton]

Never liked eq's myself, though to be fair I've never tried any.

I always thought the point of buying a hifi or headphone set up was BECAUSE YOU LIKED THE SOUND OF THE SYSTEM.

After all if you like the sound enough to buy the system, why then buy something that totally f**ks about with it?!!?

 

[Gluegun]

God, i hate EQ's....

I turn Winamps EQ *on*, while it is set to flat, and I can immediately hear some distortion....

gyah.......

you use a minimum of a hiqh quality analog eq to make speakers not suck so badly for the room....

but as far as headphones? gyah... if you want a warm sound for bright headphones, get a warm sounding system....

 

[Tim D]

We complain because we are very very very picky. We would complain more if a digital EQ was in the system that was not up to par. And the things we complain about are not always EQ fixable.

Its like art...maybe you've got some sculpted playdoh made by a ten year old, you think it could look better so you resculpt it the way you like. Than you got David's Michaelangelo (awww crap I reversed the two...stupid imature inside jokes!)...and you think his hands are a little too big compared to the body. I seriously doubt you'll try to resculpt the latter.

 

[raymondlin]

I have a 14 band Digital EQ, from 20Hz to 16Hz, you could adjust everything and it is quite "cool" with the different effect it has on the sound. I have tried it only once in the 18 months since I've had it (bought 2nd from a friend, and when my hifi was "loFi then"), why? because I now believe the cleaner the signal path the better. Also I have found that the EQ introduce a lot of distortion into the sound, may be it wasn't grounded or something, but the bass is all over the place and I had to unplug it. Even switched off, it still causing problems to the sound.

One major reason why people don't use it is, if you need an EQ to tune to the sound you like, you have bought the WRONG system in the first place. And thats what audition are for, so you get what you want with the sound you want. If you think the bass is lacking, try something else, if you think it's too bright, try something else. Mix them together until the system sound right.

 

[Tim D]

Also are you talking about Digital EQ as another piece of expensive equipment or something entirely in the software processing domain where you burn to CD-R.

Hardware EQ's are actually not cheap if they are any good. http://www.clarityeq.com

Software is nice because you can get precision and its cheap because its not real-time processing, but than its the issue of time where you are working as a sound engineer for every recording, utilizing a lot of CPU and harddisk as well when you could be doing so much more important things like...playing CS.

What Software EQ do you use?

 

[Xevion]

Well, I do use some equalization. I do try to minimize it however. When my main headphones were the HD500s after I heard the 600s I would lower the 170Hz setting and the 320 setting a fair bit in Winamp and it helped the sound a lot. With my HD600s, I can't do anything that improves the sound. I just can't find a better sounding EQ then no EQ. Hooked up to a CD player I don't touch an EQ - simply CDP->airhead(Through Ratshack gold RCA to mini)->Hd600

Also, I turn the bass setting down a bit on my reciever, my speakers have a very warm, boxy sound which is a bit too warm and makes the 600s sound cold to me (But a quick listen to the Bose 301s remedies that).

Gluegun - you must have sensitive ears. I can hear distortion pretty easily if the settings are cranked up like +10db, but can't hear the difference between having the EQ on and off with it flat.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

Arrrgh! I typed up a full reply and it's gone

Here's a short one

Quote:

That is why people usually use several different phones. For me my time is more valuable than the cost of a pair of headphones. Therefore, I am not going to take the time to rip a reequalized CD when I could better spend the time actually listening to it on a pair of cans that I think are better suited to the music for me. That is my opinion and I firmly believe in different sytrokes for different folks. Your method seems very well thought out and if it works for you that is all that really matters. I also thank you for sharing your experiences as that is what this board is all about

Well I guess the cost of a pair of headphones is more valuable than my time. The time I spent EQing my CDs is inversely proportional to the quality of the cans I had. So I spent a lot of time EQing back when I only had the AIWA HP-X225. Now that I've got the EX70 I spend less time equalizing. Funny thing is although the aiwas can't compare to the EX70 when playing normal CDs, I like the aiwas better when playing EQed & crossfed CDs compared to my EX70, with or without EQ--perhaps it's because the aiwas are (barely!) circumaural and thus more involving and visceral... But it brings up a big potential advantage with EQ... Say you have a system system that sounds great to you in every other way, now if only that tonal balance were right for you too... Say you bought a Stax Omega II w/amp only to find it's too bright for you and had to go back to HD600s or something. Now the Stax is obviously the higher-end system. It'd be such a shame to throw it away for nothing that a little EQ won't fix

Quote:

Never liked eq's myself, though to be fair I've never tried any. I always thought the point of buying a hifi or headphone set up was BECAUSE YOU LIKED THE SOUND OF THE SYSTEM. After all if you like the sound enough to buy the system, why then buy something that totally f**ks about with it?!!?

Well I probably won't have any chance to audition or even see either the HD580s or the Porta Corda, so I'll be buying both sight unseen, so help me God.

I know that if I find the HD580s too dark or something (although unlikely becoz I like dark

) EQ is my only option

Quote:

Also are you talking about Digital EQ as another piece of expensive equipment or something entirely in the software processing domain where you burn to CD-R. Hardware EQ's are actually not cheap if they are any good. http://www.clarityeq.com Software is nice because you can get precision and its cheap because its not real-time processing, but than its the issue of time where you are working as a sound engineer for every recording, utilizing a lot of CPU and harddisk as well when you could be doing so much more important things like...playing CS. What Software EQ do you use?

I guess I am only talking about software EQ... can't say anything about hardware ones, coz I don't own any.

The EQ I use is the Winamp EQ plugin by Naoki Shibata--great guy, he's now one of the people behind the great LAME mp3 encoder, among other things--I gather the EQ was one of his earlier projects. It's got 18 preset bands from 55-19912Hz, plus any number of parametric EQs that let you boost or cut any range of frequencies by any amount (I only recommend cut) And I do spend a lot of time polishing my EQ. I mean I

1) Spend half a day listening to frequency sweeps after buying new headphones to roughly determine the frequency response of the cans, with the help of Fletcher-Munson curves to correct the dips and humps in the human ear's frequency response

2) Do preliminary evaluation of the product on the computer by switching between the EQ curve produced in (1) and a flat EQ with gain matched to the volume when EQed

3) After corrections made in (2), burn a few CDs to test out the settings on my primary playback equipment--my discman

4) Go back to the computer to make some more corrections

Actually the EQ is capable of real-time work. If I get the money to upgrade my dream system would be centred around not conventional HiFi components but a (quiet) computer with a high-quality (external) sound card with (digital?) line-in and line-out, and commercial-grade EQ that outdoes what I have right now (?) There's a Winamp plugin that allows CD playback not directly from the CD drive but by a sort of real-time rip-and-decode process that turns your computer CD drive into a CD transport

Or I can hook up a real CD transport to the digital line in

This way at least I don't need to burn CDs anymore

 

[AuralBliss]

I think most look for a natural and musical sound first, a pleasing sound, then second, they look for accuracy of response. Most I think, would rather not give up the first to gain the second, this is the perception. We may complain about certain shortcomings but usually they are greatly outweigh by other good points.

 

[Joe Bloggs]

1. pleasing sound
2. accuracy of response

(1) can be achieved with EQ anytime

It's combining (1) with (2) that is difficult and what I strive to achieve

 

[Dusty Chalk]

Joe

Two things about EQ that you need to be aware of.

1) They are not a fix-all, as you seem to believe.

For example, a lot of what we were talking about in another thread regarding frequency-dependant-compression (which I will henceforth refer to as FDC) cannot be "fixed" with EQ. FDC sounds like anamolies (?sp) in the frequency response, but in fact, if you run other music through it, it will react differently. What you really need to do is come as close as you can to accurate and musical sound as you can (can afford, can hear, etc.), and then let your brain do the rest.

The best analogy I can come up with is light. If you look at a scene through white light (all frequencies, equal amounts), you will see it as it really is (arguments with this are outside of the scope of the point I am trying to make). If the light is slightly yellow or slightly blue or something, and you get used to it, your mind will still see the scene as it really is...until you see it in white light again, such as walking outside after living with electric lights for hours. (That's when you hear the great "a veil is lifted" analogy.) But if the light is radically red or radically blue, it will begin to distort. A green apple in slightly red light will still be registered in the mind as a green apple, although it will look slightly darker than it really does, but a green apple in a very red light will look black. Your mind cannot correct for these, that's why bad headphones suck.

2) EQ introduces colorations of their own.

Yes, even I can hear it. I used to like the sound. But we are talking a very fine level of detail here. We are talking that level of detail of going, for example, from a push-pull amp to a SE amp. Or a no-feedback opamp. Or OTL design. Which you may have noticed that a lot of us do.

For example -- digital EQ can't help but ring. You can't get frequency information from a single sample, so you have to write a matrix which takes samples on either side and utilizes them in the equation (yes, I've done this, but not recently, so don't ask me to get out my linear algebra textbooks), which is inherently inaccurate. It will necessarily "smear" the frequency information in the time domain.

You could, as I suspect these Clarity products do, then compensate for that in a known manner, but that is either an expensive issue, or a time-consuming issue, depending on whether you do it yourself or not.

L, for that matter, there was a very interesting article about compensating for speakers' crossovers a while back in...AudioXpress (?I think?)...to put the time-domain accuracy back into the signal being ultimately produced by the entire system. The author of the article had to necessarily burn CD's, because he was basically running the signal through the filter "backwards" (in a linear algebra sense, which means backwards in the time-domain as well).

But I digress.

Analog EQ's colour the signal as well, in other ways. (Left as an exercise for the reader.)

Not meant as a flame, just answering your original question, "why don't we use EQ?" Here, you have my answer.