Tune your system the way live pro sound people do for cheap

[cwall99]

Hook up a 50 dollar or less equalizer you can find at a pawn shop into your system and you are ready to go to tune your system to an an equal loudness curve across the display of the iphones RTA app.

Or, if you're like me, and you're using a decent (that's a key word there) AVR, you can, instead of using a meat-EQ, use the digital EQ built into Audyssey or MCACC (Pioneer Elite - which is what I use) or whatever system you use.

Cool idea, though. Will have to try it. Next weekend, my son with the HDMI-equipped laptop is coming home from college, and we'll have to give it a shot.

Damn... none of us has an iPhone.

 

[cwall99]

Not sure I buy into that. Yes, I agree, that good speakers and good placement certainly help vs. poor of either. The best possible placement is often a deal-breaker for many people. I'll go out on a limb and say most people don't have free reign to place speakers for optimal response. Or, if they do have free reign, they still don't go that way due to aesthetics, etc.

Actually, it's the most dreaded acronym in the (faux-)audiophile world: WAF.

 

[whoaru99]

I believe those auto EQ units at least can help you nail the room nodes. From there it's up to you to deal with Fletcher Munson + your own take on the music. I do believe once it's dialed in though there is little need to mess with it. At least that is what I found after I pink noise and and RTA tested my systems.

Of course it's easy to say the final result is up to personal preference and, I guess, it is. But I always go back to "some people like the bass at +11" and while that may be their preference it doesn't necessarily qualify as good sound in the big scheme. Don't get me wrong, I like the bottom end tilted up a slight bit in my HT system but having things set flat as I can get them then visualizing the before and after with the curves I think helps a lot with understanding what you're hearing. IOW, at least one gains insight into what (relatively) flat FR sounds like as a basis of comparison.

 

[the-real-mandak]

One rather noteworty difference is that Room EQ Wizard itself is nothing more than an analysis tool with some capability to export some settings to a short list of external devices.

Audyssey is the measuring analysis tool and the hardware that actually does the tuning, and does it all automatically. It also incorporates both time domain and frequency corrections from multiple points in the room.

Agreed, REW let's you decide what to do with you're audio signal. With Audyssey you flick a switch and hope for the best.

Let me give you 2 examples where software like Audyssey has problems:

1. A general rule about tuning speakers is, "do not try to make the speaker do something it can't do". If a speaker has a dip at a crossover point, the software will detect this dip and try to compensate by boosting the eq. But the problem is that the speakers simply do not work well at that particular point, so boosting will just make things much worse. The software do not take notice of the capability of you're system, it just looks at numbers and robots don't have musicality.


2. The time domain, Audyssey states: "In the time domain, the first arrival of sound is seen as a large spike and it corresponds to the sound signal coming directly from the loudspeaker. A few milliseconds later, copies of the direct sound signal arrive after they have been reflected and modified by the room (walls, ceiling, floor, furniture, etc.). Because these reflected copies arrive so close to the direct sound, the brain blends everything together and this results in audible artifacts such as smearing of transients, ringing, and comb filtering. The result is muddy sound. MultEQ filters are specifically designed to address these time domain problems and concentrate most of the signal energy in the direct sound. In the graph on the right hand side, the reflections have been dramatically reduced and the first spike is narrower and stronger thus allowing pure sound from the loudspeaker to arrive at each seat."

To align the speakers on the same time line is no big science (now a days), but to remove room reflections without room treatment - that will properly give a Nobel price What they can do, is introducing a reversed phase signal or dynamic EQ to the audio signal coming after the "direct sound". And this way achieve a "nice" reading on the graph by noise canceling or dimming the freq. that would be present in the reflected signal. But the price is screwing around with the audio signal big time and losing some of the program in the org. audio signal.

 

[whoaru99]

Agreed, REW let's you decide what to do with you're audio signal. With Audyssey you flick a switch and hope for the best.

Let me give you 2 examples where software like Audyssey has problems:

1. A general rule about tuning speakers is, "do not try to make the speaker do something it can't do". If a speaker has a dip at a crossover point, the software will detect this dip and try to compensate by boosting the eq. But the problem is that the speakers simply do not work well at that particular point, so boosting will just make things much worse. The software do not take notice of the capability of you're system, it just looks at numbers and robots don't have musicality.


2. The time domain, Audyssey states: "In the time domain, the first arrival of sound is seen as a large spike and it corresponds to the sound signal coming directly from the loudspeaker. A few milliseconds later, copies of the direct sound signal arrive after they have been reflected and modified by the room (walls, ceiling, floor, furniture, etc.). Because these reflected copies arrive so close to the direct sound, the brain blends everything together and this results in audible artifacts such as smearing of transients, ringing, and comb filtering. The result is muddy sound. MultEQ filters are specifically designed to address these time domain problems and concentrate most of the signal energy in the direct sound. In the graph on the right hand side, the reflections have been dramatically reduced and the first spike is narrower and stronger thus allowing pure sound from the loudspeaker to arrive at each seat."

To align the speakers on the same time line is no big science (now a days), but to remove room reflections without room treatment - that will properly give a Nobel price What they can do, is introducing a reversed phase signal or dynamic EQ to the audio signal coming after the "direct sound". And this way achieve a "nice" reading on the graph by noise canceling or dimming the freq. that would be present in the reflected signal. But the price is screwing around with the audio signal big time and losing some of the program in the org. audio signal.

1. Of course Audyssey will try to correct it...that's the whole point. If the speakers have inherently poor performance don't blame that on Audyssey.

2. So the unmodified sound sucks because of reflections causing muddiness and Audyssey makes an attempt to fix it by first measuring the room's impulse responses then calculating and applying impulse response filters. In what way does it really matter if the impulses making up the problem are absorbed/attenuated by room treatments or canceled/attenuated by the room correction technology? In either case, the impulses are greatly minimized.

 

[ev13wt]

You cannot remove nodes with EQ. A node take a certain duration to establish itself. I you dial it out with pink noise useing EQ, and you have a very short (Bass) tone, it will be to low in volume.

Its always better to battle nodes with speaker or listening position, baffles and so forth.

 

[whoaru99]

You cannot remove nodes with EQ. A node take a certain duration to establish itself. I you dial it out with pink noise useing EQ, and you have a very short (Bass) tone, it will be to low in volume.

Its always better to battle nodes with speaker or listening position, baffles and so forth.

I don't believe Audyssey is attempting to address nodes by EQ as I understand it. It's doing it by the process that I (likely poorly) described above. Then again, perhaps you weren't referring to Audyssey at all.

 

[Fred Sanford]

To align the speakers on the same time line is no big science (now a days), but to remove room reflections without room treatment - that will properly give a Nobel price What they can do, is introducing a reversed phase signal or dynamic EQ to the audio signal coming after the "direct sound". And this way achieve a "nice" reading on the graph by noise canceling or dimming the freq. that would be present in the reflected signal. But the price is screwing around with the audio signal big time and losing some of the program in the org. audio signal.

ev13wt

You cannot remove nodes with EQ. A node take a certain duration to establish itself. I you dial it out with pink noise useing EQ, and you have a very short (Bass) tone, it will be to low in volume.

Its always better to battle nodes with speaker or listening position, baffles and so forth.

It's so hard to get people to understand the element of time in these equations...EQ can only go so far before it's removing music (instant) in order to reduce what's actually room effects (delayed). They're all useful tools, and in the end it's up to the end user what the acceptable cost/benefit ratio is- they just rarely understand when that balance point is.

je

P.S. by the way, that's not addressed at whoaru in any way, just a general comment. I think some conversations here are overlapping.

 

[whoaru99]

Even it it was, that's OK. I just didn't understand the resistance to Audyssey...it's not like too many people (a rather small percentage of all "audio people" I'd bet) are using REQW and manual tuning or an automatic system like Audyssey anyway.

IMHO, even if the results of an automatic system weren't quite as good as a bunch of hand futzing (and that may be debatable), the ease of the automatic systems puts better sound in the reaches of more people in a situation in which they're more likely to use it. Of course there will always be a preferred tonality for some and for that group it's likely all a moot point anyway.

 

[Fred Sanford]

Even it it was, that's OK. I just didn't understand the resistance to Audyssey...it's not like too many people (a rather small percentage of all "audio people" I'd bet) are using REQW and manual tuning or an automatic system like Audyssey anyway.

IMHO, even if the results of an automatic system weren't quite as good as a bunch of hand futzing (and that may be debatable), the ease of the automatic systems puts better sound in the reaches of more people in a situation in which they're more likely to use it. Of course there will always be a preferred tonality for some and for that group it's likely all a moot point anyway.

It might be in the way some of the auto-systems are marketed (or played up in private conversations) as "solving" room issues. I do agree that (properly performed) the auto systems are a help to those that wouldn't bother with a full manual setup, or need a quick setup on a system that moves among different venues. If you can then tweak to taste afterwards, all the better.

je

 

[barredowl]

"You cannot remove nodes with EQ."

This is factually wrong, you most certainly can remove frequency spikes in a room, I have done this myself both on on pro and home equipment, what is difficult to deal with is large suckouts, those are better dealt with, with room treatments.

 

[Fred Sanford]

"You cannot remove nodes with EQ."

This is factually wrong, you most certainly can remove frequency spikes in a room, I have done this myself both on on pro and home equipment, what is difficult to deal with is large suckouts, those are better dealt with, with room treatments.

You only quoted his first line- what response would you have to the next two lines?

A node take a certain duration to establish itself. I you dial it out with pink noise useing EQ, and you have a very short (Bass) tone, it will be to low in volume.

I never have any luck explaining this in a forum setting, but here goes another attempt:

What he's saying is that using an EQ for that purpose is trying to reduce what's going to build up over time later by reducing the amount of music that's playing (at certain specific frequencies) right now. You can use an EQ to make your RTA's graph show flat for continuous/ongoing sound, but you haven't actually removed the reflections & resonances- you've simply reduced the amount of music (which I'd assume is what you actually would like to hear) that's happening right now so that the build-up doesn't occur as much.

You're not actually removing the problem, you're reducing aspects of the music in order to minimize the problem's obviousness.

je

 

[barredowl]

Sounds like a nice idea Fred, in practice exactly what you want to do is reduce the gain in a certain frequency band because the room node (resonance or reflections) has increased the gain in that band the first place. So you aren't really removing any music *that you hear* but are rather restoring the gain for that frequency band back to what it would be with no room node. This works in the actual empirical world, been there, done that. A music reproduction system that has been EQd for room node peaks sounds subjectively noticeably better in as many as 3 areas:

a) in detail in eliminating masking frequencies and


b) in eliminating sibilance or

c) muddy bass.

Now these may not all be happening at once depending on how many room nodes you have, but it is almost certain everyones room is causing at least one of these thing to happen.

Room treatments are great BTW, and crucial for suckouts, but EQing peaks by say 6 db or less does not damage the sound quality.

 

[barredowl]

If you don't believe me next time you go to a live concert ask the sound man if you can see the EQ for the main speakers, I'll bet money it's not flat. Same fro any recording studio BTW.

 

[barredowl]

It mysterious to me why there is so much resistance to equalization in home audio considering *both* any studio recording you listen to and any live concert has likely been through easily 4 to a dozen stages of EQ depending on the complexity of the setup. if EQ damages music all the amplified music you are hearing comes pre damaged, fortunatly there is no evidence judicious use of EQ damages music in any way and often it makes it sound *much* better.

 

[Fred Sanford]

Sounds like a nice idea Fred, in practice exactly what you want to do is reduce the gain in a certain frequency band because the room node (resonance or reflections) has increased the gain in that band the first place.

^ ...here you're taking time into account...

So you aren't really removing any music *that you hear* but are rather restoring the gain for that frequency band back to what it would be with no room node. This works in the actual empirical world, been there, done that.

^ ...and here you're kind of ignoring time. You are removing some of the direct sound in order to reduce the total sum of the next instant's direct sound + the reflected sound of what came before. It works, it's a viable approach lots of people use (including me), it can certainly be an improvement, but it's not a complete cure.

A music reproduction system that has been EQd for room node peaks sounds subjectively noticeably better in as many as 3 areas:

a) in detail in eliminating masking frequencies and

b) in eliminating sibilance or

c) muddy bass.

Now these may not all be happening at once depending on how many room nodes you have, but it is almost certain everyones room is causing at least one of these thing to happen.

I agree, mostly. I think it's the words like "eliminating" and "remove" that I'm taking issue with. I'm not disagreeing with your observations or the overall theme of this thread, just some of the generalizations & language.

Room treatments are great BTW, and crucial for suckouts, but EQing peaks by say 6 db or less does not damage the sound quality.

I agree with you in general. Either way, in a live room with very audible reflections, no EQ alone is going to "eliminate" the problem, though it can help make things better- the room's properties would need to be changed.

je

 

[Fred Sanford]

If you don't believe me next time you go to a live concert ask the sound man if you can see the EQ for the main speakers, I'll bet money it's not flat. Same fro any recording studio BTW.

I've worked running sound for concerts and recording in studios for almost 30 years now. I'm no expert, but I get the concept. Two very different circumstances, usually, though. A recording studio's rooms have (hopefully) been treated effectively so that there's minimal processing needed (at least in the control room), and with a live sound system that moves from venue to venue (or an installed system where the room/stage/seating parameters change show to show) you're making do with what you've got for resources (gear, experience, manpower, speaker location options, time, etc.) on the fly (with tons of variables, depending on venue type & scale of the show).

je

 

[barredowl]

I not denying that one should treat the room first, that is absolutely the correct procedure, what bugs me is people who refuse to measure, and insist that no tone controls are better, and do their EQing by switching out expensive speakers, turntables, amp, etc. Some knowledge of the way professionals proceed would break a lot of pointless log jams in the home audio hobby IMO.

 

[BmWr75]

Just saw this thread for the first time today. I used a modded Behringer DEQ2496 today to AutoEQ/Room Correct two sets of amps and speakers running off the same analog front end. Certainly agree with barredowl's on room treatment and EQing.

 

[the-real-mandak]

If you don't believe me next time you go to a live concert ask the sound man if you can see the EQ for the main speakers, I'll bet money it's not flat. Same fro any recording studio BTW.

Next time you go to a live concert, ask the FOH guy to show you the auto room calibration unit

Sorry, just couldn't resist.

The thread is called "Tune your system the way live pro sound people do for cheap"