Quote:
Originally Posted by Kirosia
I'm not a fan of eq, I like things the way they are.
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And how do you know exactly how they are? How do you know if the driver you are listening to, is reproducing exactly what was recorded, and the way it was recorded....unless you spend huge amounts of money in room treatments, and ultraexpensive amps, and transducers, or headphones setups with outrageous prices, you will never get that, the EQ (and tone controls) are a lot cheaper, and will correct those problems even better, in fact, they are used along all the process of recording and making the master tapes, all the recording studios uses them.......but anyway, this is a general believe here, and i wll not try to persuade anybody of using or not them, and just for curiosity, I was reading about the topic some time ago, and I found this article, sorry there no way of linking it, so I will post a fragment, it is from the white noise audio website and made by a really knowledgeable person:
".......Oh catastrophe! Oh Armageddon! Oh end of the audio world as we know it - White Noise have developed a tone control module! What's worse is that it was developed to satisfy considerable customer demand! A lot of nonsense is talked about tone controls. "They cause phase shifts", sure they do, but this is not necessarily detrimental to sound quality, and in any case the phase shifts are much smaller than those caused by the crossover networks inside almost every loudspeaker cabinet. "I can hear the difference between tone controls active but set to neutral and tone controls switched out", sure you can, but this has nothing to do with the tone control design itself and everything to do with lousy matching between the sections of almost all stereo potentiometers. Poorly matching potentiometer sections means that there is no "neutral" position for the tone controls. If the amplifier manufacturers can persuade listeners that tone controls are a bad thing they can shave pounds off the production cost of each amplifier, whilst keeping the retail price unchanged. Neat huh? Of course an even better trick is to leave out the phono stage ( "no one listens to vinyl these days" ), while keeping the retail price of the amplifier unchanged, and then sell you the necessary phono stage as an add on at a hugely inflated price ( "they're expensive because there is no demand and anway we're doing you a favour by making them at all").
Imagine that you have just bought a very expensive loudspeaker and it sounds a little bright in the extreme treble for your taste. You write to your favourite hi-fi magazine for advice. No problem they tell you, sell your new loudspeakers, at a considerable loss, and buy Brand X loudspeakers which are well known for their understated treble in listening rooms nearly identical to yours. Get a life! One or two dB of treble cut would have solved that problem for nothing. Before your favourite music has been burned onto a CD, or cut in vinyl, it has already passed through numerous tone controls and equalisers but the critics never claim that all recorded music is unnatural sounding as it would be if tone controls and equalisers had a deleterious effect on sound quality. Tone controls are invaluable for ironing out minor incompatibilities between components, quirks of individual listening rooms, and differences of taste between the producer of your favourite CD/LP and yourself. For example if you compare the recorded version of songs by rock groups with the live music you invariably find that the former is always bass light. I like music to sound as real as possible so I always use a touch of bass boost when playing rock music....."
