Like, if you take away 4db “from treble”, should that be distributed roughly amongst bass and mid or solely either if you want it to be heavy for that range?
Is it like an equation that benefits from balancing it out?
An equalizer does not have to sum up to any specific number. Each frequency range is basically being amplified or attenuated individually. You are boosting or reducing specific frequency ranges. If you reduce them all equally, then the end result is that your song is lower volume. If you boost them all, your song is louder.
Of note: boosting songs may cause occasional crackling sounds. If this is the case it is because the boosting is clipping the top end of the amplitude of your signal at various frequencies. So boost moderately. You are better off reducing some frequencies and leaving the rest normal and increase the volume of the source to compensate whenever possible.
Yeah, that last paragraph is important. I’m a professional audio technician, and way too many people will begin with boosts instead of cuts. But cutting is much easier on a technical level, because you’re just lowering the volume of something. Boosting is much more technically complicated, because you’re “adding” signal that doesn’t already exist. So you have to make that signal from something, and that’s much more technically difficult than simply turning the volume down.
Imagine you have a signal coming in at a baseline of 0dB. Cutting 6dB is easy, because you simply let less of the signal pass. But if you want to turn it up 6dB, you need to “create” that 6dB from somewhere, because it doesn’t already exist. You can’t just “turn it up” because it’s already turned all the way up at 0dB.
No. The eq should be the inverse of the room/speaker response; it’s irrelevant if the gains add to zero.
And, most music has way more energy in certain (generally lower) bands, so it’s not like making the numbers sum to zero results in the same total energy.
I think that’s a very important point. If you “balance” the EQ like you describe but you boost a frequency band that our ears are more sensitive to and lower a band that we’re less sensitive to by the same amount of dB… The mix might still sound louder than before.
So don’t worry too much about the numbers and heed the great advice given in this thread.
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I’m no audiophile, but I always adjust the EQ based on what I’m listening to and optimize it to my preference. Sometimes it just needs an adjustment to a specific frequency range (reduce the treble a bit, boost the midrange so the vocals are more apparent, etc).
A lot of the EQ presets will apply symmetrically, though. e.g. “Rock” on my phone’s EQ will boost the lowest and highest frequencies equally while slightly reducing the middle range. The “Pop” preset does the exact opposite.
My non-audiophile advice is to just set them to what sounds best to you.
Nah, that’s part of the point of granular control. Sometimes you want/need a decrease in a given band without an increase in the rest.
Perfect example is the Metallica album St Anger. If you fiddle with the eq in a good player that allows for per-album or per-sing settings, you can dial back the over mixed high hat and partially dampen the tin can snare. You end up with a better sound (particularly in headphones) that doesn’t fatigue the ear as much.
If you took those attenuated bands and upped the others, you’d just have muddy mids and you’d lose the clarity of James’ low end.
That album is so over drummed that it’s hard to listen to without eq tweaks. With them, it’s a much better experience.
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No. It doesn’t work like that at all.
You might as well turn up the volume knob to gain back the lost amplitude. That will maintain the mix that you just set to your liking. Just set it as you like it.
However, if you do boost the frequencies a lot so the signal starts clipping, then it begins to make sense to adjust the faders in relation to each other until it stops clipping and still have the “shape” that you like, and then use the volume knob afterwards again.
For instance, if you like a lot of bass and turn up the bass, then it’ll likely clip. It might be better to turn everything else but the bass down and then boost the volume.
This is mostly an issue for the bass area. Our hearing is (logarithmically) less sensitive to low frequencies, so in order to turn up the bass we have to make it much louder than if we want to turn up the treble. The bass easily takes up the entire “headroom” available in the signal, resulting in clipping before it is amplified. The rule of thumb is that cutting is better than boosting.
Anyway, unless you’re compensating for a bad speaker or similar, it’s generally best to leave the EQ alone. Professionally produced music is already mastered to utilise the entire frequency spectrum in a balanced way so that it can be safely turned up without having certain frequencies dominate the output or to turn it down without losing the details.
Using an EQ post production is somewhat like salting a gourmet meal. Chances are that it’s making it worse unless you know why you’re doing it.
Obviously you can listen to music however you want, but please pay attention to what happens when you turn up the volume. It’s likely that you’ll want to use less EQ as the volume goes up.
For sure, I’m experimenting with it for purposes unrelated to simple listening and appreciation purposes, more context and ambience related
I’m not sure what you’re up to but if you are using software to do it, perhaps a multiband compressor would be more suitable than an EQ.
I’m using something like that, does all kinds of multiple bands shenanigans
On my phone, I can’t set the volume high enough for things to be audible via the phone speaker, due to stupid OS limitations.
So, to mitigate that, I’ve pushed all the sliders in the equalizer to the top. It doesn’t sound any different, just louder.
That’s also what happens, if you don’t balance the numbers. It’s just overall slightly more or less loud. And the numbers for volume are completely arbitrary anyways, so no need to worry about it.
Interesting question. I’ve always used my ears because you can’t just plus and minus frequency ranges to get the sound you want since some frequencies may sound louder than others due to a number of factors (environment, hardware, ears, physics, etc).
I like to think of a flat EQ as 0, and you can add or subtract frequency ranges for taste/needs.
You really only want to be concerned about a sort of 0 level if you’re overall volume is clipping/distorting and you can ring it down for some reason.
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