what are med/high level frequencies?

[quiksliver]

I don't know if this belongs here, feel free to move this sucker

I was just wondering what mid and high level frequencies are when people talk about them relating to headphones, I know low level means more/better bass but I don't know what the mid or high levels are

and what kind of music fits into the mid/high level ranges? i know techno, hip hop etc go into the low ranges...

specifically, I listen to a lot of indie rock, and alot of acoustic stuff as well so what kind of frequencies am I looking for in headphones?

 

[bigshot]

Mids are where vocals sit. Highs are cymbals.

The idea isn't to get a lot of bass, or extra highs... It's to get a balance of frequencies across the whole spectrum. The more balanced the response, the better the sound. (Achieving that is more difficult than it sounds.)

See ya
Steve

 

[Bizzel]

Not meaning to hijack the thread, but where would a violin sit? I imagine it would be upper mids / lower highs, around here on average?

Low -------- Mids ----X---- Highs

 

[micaela]

If you have access to any kind of equalizer - play with it a bit. Take out whole frequency ranges & listen to what is missing. As you play with it, you will begin to get a good idea of what instruments reside in each frequency range.

 

[paulb09]

This is somewhat subjective as in these forums people tend to talk about "lows", "mids" and "highs" without quoting frequency response. Not that frequency response would determine our perception of these "values", but it would give some kind of measurement perhaps.

As you brought this up, I was interested to see how around how low a double bass would be. Looking up quickly on Wikipedia, I read these two pieces:

"The lowest note of a double bass is an E1 (on standard four-string basses) at approximately 41 Hz or a B0 (when five strings are used) at approximately 31 Hz"
"The double bass is generally tuned in fourths, in contrast to the other members of the orchestral string family, which are tuned in fifths. This avoids too long a finger stretch (known as an "extension"). Modern double basses are usually tuned (low to high) E-A-D-G. The lowest string is tuned to E (the same pitch as the lowest E on a modern piano, approximately 41 cycles per second), nearly three octaves below middle C; and the highest string is tuned to G, an octave and a fourth below middle C (approximately 98 cycles per second)."

So I'd definitely class one in the bass area, but it is interesting to learn that one of the lower notes on a piano is effectively as low as a double bass.

[edit] Quote:

If you have access to any kind of equalizer - play with it a bit. Take out whole frequency ranges & listen to what is missing. As you play with it, you will begin to get a good idea of what instruments reside in each frequency range.

Great idea. I'm now interested to see what other instruments I can find that I imagine as being higher or lower than they technically are!

 

[bigshot]

Most music resides in the frequencies between 40Hz and 10kHz.

See ya
Steve

 

[omegaman]

Here's a thread loads of great info :-

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/f11/ok...s-nice-249333/

 

[sejarzo]

My rule of thumb is that bass runs up to 200-300 Hz, mids to 2000-3000 Hz, and highs above that. The crossover frequency in a typical two-way speaker is usually somewhere around 2 to 2.5 kHz.

This page has a good chart and explanation:

PSB Speakers - The Frequencies of Music

One can see that the violin/viola/cello cover a huge range, and that's for the fundamentals only--not the higher harmonics. It's not possible to classify almost any single instrument as being strictly in one range.