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drobo

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do you guys tweak EQ per album?

 

Sometimes per track.  If Audyssey FLAT sounds O.K., I just leave it.  If it needs a tad less treble, I try Audyssey Reference.  If it needs to be tweeked with tone controls, I most often increase the bass a bit.  Once in a while, I need to use the treble control.  Back when I had graphic equalizers, I found it practically impossible to set a different EQ for each track or album.

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What a difference 20 years makes in terms of available digital electronics (active crossovers) and computers/software. 

 

The room that Burwen has (in the linked article, just above) and the horn-loaded loudspeakers are still impressive by today's standards, although I do believe it is overkill in light of today's typical recordings and the limitations that are imposed there, unless you do your own recordings--as Burwen says that he does, and as PWK and John Eargle did many years before that in the late 1950s-early 1960s.

 

Burwen's description of the EQ required to correct certain music and soundtrack sources is almost identical to my experience using Audacity to correct two channel CDs and higher sample rate/depth stereo recordings.  However, my experience with 5.1 multichannel music recordings available nowadays leads me to leave those recordings alone for the most part.  Getting the 5.1 balance right is a much more demanding exercise, and apparently, having a dedicated subwoofer channel in the mix eliminates the temptation for current mastering engineers from trying to make the entire mix "louder" by attenuating bass and boosting higher harmonics from 1-10 kHz, and then attenuating the highest audible frequencies above 10 kHz to 20 kHz.

 

Burwen's experience in terms of the sensitivity to changes in EQ over a large frequency band also duplicates my experience.  Once I get the overall EQ close to a more natural presentation (like the mix-down tracks might have before mastering in the original recordings), only extremely small changes are needed to change the character of the music extensively. 

 

I'm reminded of the commercials of chimpanzees in business meetings collectively destroying the conference rooms and A/V electronics, and I think of what current mastering houses are actually doing to the music tracks.  It's both a funny and an extremely disappointing visual image that runs through my mind when I'm remastering. It just doesn't take very much EQ to change the nature of the recording, much less EQ than I see that's being used commercially on the whole.

 

What's interesting to me is that Burwen doesn't emphasize the amount of bass attenuation that is present in all commercial stereo orchestral and solo classical instrument recordings, particularly solo piano, violin, and flute.  When I look at the incoming stereo tracks coming into Audacity for remastering (often times winding up with a correction curve of the order of Burwen's equalization plots found in the linked article), I have to steel myself every time to the level of abuse that most of the original recordings that I see and hear have embedded in them initially.  It can be extremely disappointing to experience over and over while remastering.

 

Fortunately, most of that damage is reversible with remastering EQ without loss of bit depth of the original recordings. The increase in listening pleasure for most recordings is greater than any hardware changes in terms of loudspeakers, amplifiers, preamps, and DACs that I've heard.  The remastering using EQ is the single most important factor in making these recordings sound spectacular (again).

 

It's free software, too.  Burwen clearly pushed the state of the art in the mid-1990s and paid dearly for it, too. 

 

YMMV.

 

Chris

Edited by Chris A
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By the way, some of the most spectacular recordings that I have now are those recorded and mixed by John Eargle, especially those with the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra – Zdenek Macal conducting, on the Delos label.  But you can't really hear it until you remaster the recordings back to approximately "flat" recording conditions. 

 

I was absolutely stunned by the sound of the orchestra playing Mussorgsky's  Dream of the Peasant Gritzko (you'll recognize this as Night on Bald Mountain) and Pictures at an Exhibition in his Heaven and Hell: Macal Conducts Mussorgsky CD.  It was simply spectacular to sit back and listen after the approximate inverse EQ curves were applied. 

 

Note that Eargle didn't do the mastering for his recordings - which I believe disguised the fact that his recordings were sometimes brilliant, but no one could hear it.

 

Dream of the Peasant Gritzko - Macal.GIF

 

post-26262-0-59660000-1431946442_thumb.g

 

Chris

Edited by Chris A
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Get your choice of front end components, speakers, and room treatment right and EQ can be relegated to the closet (or garage sale preferrably). Some might find it helps with poor recordings, but remove it and you will hear an increase in clarity and inner detail. The more electronics you add to the chain, the more unwanted artifacts you end up with.

 

I know I will be crucified for this opinion, but it is mine.

 

Shakey

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I know I will be crucified for this opinion, but it is mine.

 

Yep - you're basically right this time. :)

 

I'd recommend reading the article that Dennis (djk) linked to.

Edited by Chris A
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Guest Steven1963

Get your choice of front end components, speakers, and room treatment right and EQ can be relegated to the closet (or garage sale preferrably). Some might find it helps with poor recordings, but remove it and you will hear an increase in clarity and inner detail. The more electronics you add to the chain, the more unwanted artifacts you end up with.

 

I know I will be crucified for this opinion, but it is mine.

 

Shakey

 

Nope, no crucifixion. But a question: Do you find the engineers that put music to source across the genre's sound equally the same in your room? I can't go from country/rock/classical/rap and have them all agree with my room/equipment, or listening preferences without tweaking the equalizer.

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Get your choice of front end components, speakers, and room treatment right and EQ can be relegated to the closet (or garage sale preferrably). Some might find it helps with poor recordings, but remove it and you will hear an increase in clarity and inner detail. The more electronics you add to the chain, the more unwanted artifacts you end up with.

 

I know I will be crucified for this opinion, but it is mine.

 

Shakey

 

Nope, no crucifixion. But a question: Do you find the engineers that put music to source across the genre's sound equally the same in your room? I can't go from country/rock/classical/rap and have them all agree with my room/equipment, or listening preferences without tweaking the equalizer.

 

 

 

I never feel the need for an equalizer, tone controls, or any other electronic manipulation of the signal. I can go from Ravel to Tool to Willie Nelson to New Grass Revival and it all sounds good. A bad recording will be bad, a good one will be that. I know that  you can make things sound more pleasing in some ways, but to me the trade off is not one I'm willing to make.

 

I have a dedicated room that exists for the singular purpose of listening to two channel music. I have the luxury of putting the speakers and myself anywhere in the room that I like. So in my experieince, get all the ancilliaries right and you are done.

 

Again, this is my preference. YMMV.

 

Shakey

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I never feel the need for an equalizer, tone controls, or any other electronic manipulation of the signal. I can go from Ravel to Tool to Willie Nelson to New Grass Revival and it all sounds good. A bad recording will be bad, a good one will be that. I know that  you can make things sound more pleasing in some ways, but to me the trade off is not one I'm willing to make.

 

I have a dedicated room that exists for the singular purpose of listening to two channel music. I have the luxury of putting the speakers and myself anywhere in the room that I like. So in my experieince, get all the ancilliaries right and you are done.

 

Again, this is my preference. YMMV.

 

Shakey

 

 

 

Which Klipsch are you using in your dedicated 2ch setup?  I have a dedicated room also but never seem to get it right.

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The active guys here are a lot smarter than me, and a few have helped me sort out my room. BUT :)


 


I am not that old yet, but I remember back in the 70's when tone controls were not to be touched unless your system was flawed.  Then along came the EQ's that you could spend the whole weekend creating your own sound. Boost, cut, boost, cut.   Did you ever wonder why when you really turned it up that it distorted much quicker with the EQ on? Boosting output in separate frequencies, is it good for cleaning up your sound or just making Jimi's guitar more pronounced in the song?   I think the same thing happens when changing the response of a speaker,  what you gain in one area, it is lost in another area.  Audyssey, IMO is fundamentally flawed for the average room. Sure, I think it helps with dialogue in a movie and boosts the surrounds, but music?....  No way what so ever for critical listening and I can prove it to any ears on compressed mp3's to lossless files. To this day, I am shocked to hear a few of the regulars praise Audyssey when used with music. It just makes me wonder how do they judge what music content is there and what has been taken away and are they paying attention to any details or can they just not hear any? Maybe they're spending too much time staring at a graph and not trying to treat echo's and reverbs that cancel just about all of the delicates in some content.  Now don't get me wrong, I think REW is a very, very good tool and lets all agree that math is what got us here and what continues to make speakers and electronics better, much less the reading of our listening space response. I think physical room correction is overlooked too much and many would be shocked at just how big of a difference panels and other treatments make.


 


I want a pure signal, no watering down, no color added. I don't want my signal being dissected through a screen door of questionable digital filters.  I will take my content  the way it came from the studio or the mastering or remastering, just like the active guys take the same content and accommodate it for their speakers, room acoustics and/or their ears.  I dont think there is a right way or wrong way, its just a matter of preference.  I would love to hear a great active setup like a few of the guys have here. I would welcome the enlightenment to surpass the obstacles of lessor noise floors, higher THD levels, getting kennel cough, glossed over details from the digital filters and lost delicates in music passages.    I have read where some guys go active and never look back, others don't. I have read that some just cant stop fiddling with the settings non stop and throw in the towel.  


 


 I don't see this debate any different than SS vs Tubes, LP vs CD's or Modern Technology vs Nostalgia. 

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Did you ever wonder why when you really turned it up that it distorted much quicker with the EQ on? Boosting output in separate frequencies, is it good for cleaning up your sound

 

I think boosting is the problem. I cut everything making a curve that is suitable to my ear. I can't accomplish that with boosting frequencies.

Edited by SWL
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Boosting output in separate frequencies, is it good for cleaning up your sound or just making Jimi's guitar more pronounced in the song?   I think the same thing happens when changing the response of a speaker,  what you gain in one area, it is lost in another area.

 

I hear what you're saying, but I just wanted to point out that I think you're missing a bigger picture perspective on equalization. EQ should never be used to "adjust the mix", which is exactly what you're describing - so to that extent we're on the same page. However, a speaker with a non-linear frequency response, or a room with a non-linear 'power response', or the lobing from a xover, etc, etc.... are all forms of equalization. The purpose of equalization in the signal path should be seen as putting the balance back into the proper place.

 

The shortcoming of Audyssey is that it is trying to automate what is a very involved process. Measuring frequency response of acoustic systems is very complicated - not only because of how our perception works, but also because the mathematics involved require a lot of assumptions that simply aren't true in the real world. This results in a "measurement" that isn't representative of reality. Carefully moving a mic around, changing window functions, affecting boundaries near the microphone, etc.... are all required to differentiate between the various forms of aberrations in a calculated frequency response. Audyssey doesn't have that advantage because it wants to be plug and play for uneducated users - so it does a crap ton of fancy math to try and differentiate between things that should / can be corrected from things that should not / cannot be corrected. This automated process will always fall short to a manual process implemented by an educated user. This is why the pro Audyssey tools offer more manual control over the algorithms and adjustments...

 

At the end of the day there is this annoying facet that every time we touch the signal, we introduce other artifacts - be it distortion, noise, or whatever you want to call it. This is where the art of balancing compromises comes into play - and further understanding what factors affect our enjoyment of the music the most. When I put on my engineering hat, I can't help but realize that the most realistic / consistent sounding speakers have a flat power response....and physics dictates that this will have a falling on-axis frequency response. It's just how the world works and is really quite fascinating when you try to understand it further. I would propose that this dictates some form of equalization is required in the system to return it to a flat frequency response. If we're starting with a digital source, then I can't help but wonder why the heck we don't have an equalization stage in the digital domain before it turns analog. Ya I know, we got a bunch of old guys stuck stubborn about their old equipment, but then the music y'all are listening to was created with that equipment in mind - so modern techniques should probably sound worse. In those cases I can totally see the compromises not being worth it. However, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea that EQ is in its nature only a bad thing. It just requires a different context for it to not impart any artifacts. Ironically, that context doesn't exist in the normal setup today and I've wanted for years to design something that addressed that, but dang it, productizing anything is a ton of work and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is more audio...

 

One of these days we'll have a digital transport with digital EQ before the final D/A stage with our flat power response horn loaded speakers....I just hope it happens before the audiophile hobby completely dies off. Seems like all the youngens these days are fixated on headphone products. Does the fact I'm calling them youngens mean I'm getting old? That's a scary thought....

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Did you ever wonder why when you really turned it up that it distorted much quicker with the EQ on? Boosting output in separate frequencies, is it good for cleaning up your sound

 

I think boosting is the problem. I cut everything making a curve that is suitable to my ear. I can't accomplish that with boosting frequencies.

 

 

Boosting doesn't reduce the max output capabilities of the system, so I would posit that both boosting and cutting is acceptable. The anecdote of "cut only" really doesn't change / fix the problem and in many cases results in worse SNR. It's that worse SNR that makes me uncomfortable with the cut only mantra...

 

Also, you can't get the same frequency response if you only do cuts....especially with a lot of these limited analog units.

 

Btw, I personally would never drop an analog EQ into my system....thems waaaaaay too many active parts to get anything usable. Too much veil for me...

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Btw, I personally would never drop an analog EQ into my system....thems waaaaaay too many active parts to get anything usable. Too much veil for me...

 

How many mixing and mastering shops are using analog EQ over "digital" EQ? 

 

I've read what these guys are saying over at Gearslutz mastering forum, et al.: I guess if you're going to boost the average SPL of a recording by over 10 dB by using compression, limiting, and "spectral shaping" (a.k.a., EQ to boost highs and cut lows), then analog EQ is probably inaudible by the time the tracks get through that meat grinder.

 

YMMV.

 

Chris

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Boosting output in separate frequencies, is it good for cleaning up your sound or just making Jimi's guitar more pronounced in the song?   I think the same thing happens when changing the response of a speaker,  what you gain in one area, it is lost in another area.

 

I hear what you're saying, but I just wanted to point out that I think you're missing a bigger picture perspective on equalization. EQ should never be used to "adjust the mix", which is exactly what you're describing - so to that extent we're on the same page. However, a speaker with a non-linear frequency response, or a room with a non-linear 'power response', or the lobing from a xover, etc, etc.... are all forms of equalization. The purpose of equalization in the signal path should be seen as putting the balance back into the proper place.

 

The shortcoming of Audyssey is that it is trying to automate what is a very involved process. Measuring frequency response of acoustic systems is very complicated - not only because of how our perception works, but also because the mathematics involved require a lot of assumptions that simply aren't true in the real world. This results in a "measurement" that isn't representative of reality. Carefully moving a mic around, changing window functions, affecting boundaries near the microphone, etc.... are all required to differentiate between the various forms of aberrations in a calculated frequency response. Audyssey doesn't have that advantage because it wants to be plug and play for uneducated users - so it does a crap ton of fancy math to try and differentiate between things that should / can be corrected from things that should not / cannot be corrected. This automated process will always fall short to a manual process implemented by an educated user. This is why the pro Audyssey tools offer more manual control over the algorithms and adjustments...

 

At the end of the day there is this annoying facet that every time we touch the signal, we introduce other artifacts - be it distortion, noise, or whatever you want to call it. This is where the art of balancing compromises comes into play - and further understanding what factors affect our enjoyment of the music the most. When I put on my engineering hat, I can't help but realize that the most realistic / consistent sounding speakers have a flat power response....and physics dictates that this will have a falling on-axis frequency response. It's just how the world works and is really quite fascinating when you try to understand it further. I would propose that this dictates some form of equalization is required in the system to return it to a flat frequency response. If we're starting with a digital source, then I can't help but wonder why the heck we don't have an equalization stage in the digital domain before it turns analog. Ya I know, we got a bunch of old guys stuck stubborn about their old equipment, but then the music y'all are listening to was created with that equipment in mind - so modern techniques should probably sound worse. In those cases I can totally see the compromises not being worth it. However, I'm not sure I'm comfortable with the idea that EQ is in its nature only a bad thing. It just requires a different context for it to not impart any artifacts. Ironically, that context doesn't exist in the normal setup today and I've wanted for years to design something that addressed that, but dang it, productizing anything is a ton of work and the last thing I want to do at the end of the day is more audio...

 

One of these days we'll have a digital transport with digital EQ before the final D/A stage with our flat power response horn loaded speakers....I just hope it happens before the audiophile hobby completely dies off. Seems like all the youngens these days are fixated on headphone products. Does the fact I'm calling them youngens mean I'm getting old? That's a scary thought....

 

 

Great info.  Thanks!

 

 

But what about sticking to the original recording? It didn't come flat from the studio, it came in many instances to the fixation and somewhat liking of the artist.  We are changing it to accommodate our room, its shape, the furniture in it and even that noisy AC unit running next door to your listening room  :)   Unless your are listening at lets say 100db+   why not just keep the signal untouched?  Now I get the guys that Bi and Tri amp their setups that basically have to do this (or want) or go with a very elaborate passive setup that may or may not work that well in the end and others that swear by time alignment. But if you are listening at mildly strong conversation levels, what are you really gaining by altering said content....an old school loudness button?   

 

Should we also use correction for headphones?  Im sure Audyssey would manage to jack them all up if you somehow mic'd them.    Lets all turn Audyssey on, put on the headphones and listen closely to what it thinks is wrong with whats coming out of your speakers. I know the majority of horn speakers are dynamic, and big dynamics usually bring big positive db response numbers graded on a flat scale at given frequencies. A lot of guy boost bass to help with this or cut back the output of the mid and/or the tweeter.  Audyssey will steal delicates by rounding off some of the mid dynamic peaks and the same time give an ugly boost to 14K cycles and up...or at least this is my experience with it and two fairly new AVR's with XT32 I think.   It seems to boost where my ears don't need it and it takes the "magic" or a lot of the somewhat "hidden" background content or the delicates like the pads hitting the tone holes on Coltranes Sax.  Turn on Audyssey and all the extra steps you took for and money spent for that magic is gone.  I would love for it to actually make music sound better, but I think it should keep its place being advertised as a Movie "enhancer" but  not room correction. 

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