this has been probably asked before,and there are different opinions on this as i have read,but what are the optimal settings on a 7 band eq? i have a older Technics 200 watt receiver and run my blu ray,5 disc cd player and tv through it.i use it 95% the time for music and concert dvd's.the speakers are Polk Audio RTIA3's.while it sounds great,im wondering if it can sound better.is there any ballpark settings that i can experiment with to try and fine tune my sound? thanks in advance.
-
Feeling lucky? Check out the AK 24th Anniversary Giveaway thread and join in the fun!
optimal equalizer settings for 2 channel
- Thread starter bigcam406
- Start date
Register to hide this ad
petehall347
the brandy coffee man
start in the middle and take away rather than add . so if you need more mid lower the low and high.
BobbyBluz
Super Member
Every piece of equipment and the listening room involved are different as are your ears. What sounds great to one person is torment to another. I use a RTA to EQ a listening area out for an acoustically flat baseline then make needed adjustments from there. It sounds so simple yet it can get extremely complicated at times. Make adjustments for what sounds best to you and makes you happy.
mgosdin
Super Member
^ This.
Personally I've used an equalizer in a lot of different rooms over the years, it seems that no matter what kind of analysis & adjustment I do it always ends up in a "Smiley Face" or "Smirk" where the Low & High are boosted some and the Mid is pulled back.
Now one of my friends had a room where once we'd done the EQ work the result was a jagged profile ( 10 Band Pioneer EQ ) so it definitely does not always come out the same.
The key thing is to take your time and experiment.
Mark Gosdin
Personally I've used an equalizer in a lot of different rooms over the years, it seems that no matter what kind of analysis & adjustment I do it always ends up in a "Smiley Face" or "Smirk" where the Low & High are boosted some and the Mid is pulled back.
Now one of my friends had a room where once we'd done the EQ work the result was a jagged profile ( 10 Band Pioneer EQ ) so it definitely does not always come out the same.
The key thing is to take your time and experiment.
Mark Gosdin
JoeESP9
ESL's & tubes since 83
IME there are two schools of equalizer use. One is to use it to flatten the in room response of the system. This requires using test tones and making measurements. Then, using the results to adjust the equalizer for flatter in room response. These settings are different for every room. They will always change with different speakers and sometimes when changing gear.
The other way is to treat it as a glorified tone control. This method requires nothing other than one's ears. It almost always ends up with the ubiquitous "smiley face" on the sliders.
In order to do the first an equalizer with at least 10 bands (octave equalizer) is needed. One with 31 bands is even better. More bands mean finer control. Conversely it also means more complication and more opportunity to achieve poor and/or bizarre results.
A seven band equalizer is inadequate for room/system equalization. Seven bands are not enough for "fine tuning". However, IMO, seven bands are a good number for glorified tone controls.
There are no "ballpark" settings for your or any equalizer. In your situation I'd continue to use the equalizer as you've been doing. That is, adjust it as the ears suggest.
The other way is to treat it as a glorified tone control. This method requires nothing other than one's ears. It almost always ends up with the ubiquitous "smiley face" on the sliders.
In order to do the first an equalizer with at least 10 bands (octave equalizer) is needed. One with 31 bands is even better. More bands mean finer control. Conversely it also means more complication and more opportunity to achieve poor and/or bizarre results.
A seven band equalizer is inadequate for room/system equalization. Seven bands are not enough for "fine tuning". However, IMO, seven bands are a good number for glorified tone controls.
There are no "ballpark" settings for your or any equalizer. In your situation I'd continue to use the equalizer as you've been doing. That is, adjust it as the ears suggest.
savatage1973
Addicted Member
An equalizer, when properly used for room correction can be a great asset; however, 90% of the people that use one set it up with that "DJ Smile" to compensate for less than competent gear/speakers.
Start at flat and let your ears do the rest. If you find yourself with more than 2-3db modification of any band on the eq, you have other issues to address.
Start at flat and let your ears do the rest. If you find yourself with more than 2-3db modification of any band on the eq, you have other issues to address.
JoeESP9
ESL's & tubes since 83
That would commonly be called a seven band equalizer. A ten band (also called octave) equalizer has ten bands (sliders) per channel for a total of twenty.
You mentioned how many bands your equalizer has in your original post.
VolvoHeretic
Well-Known Member
Deleted. Sorry, wrong post
Last edited:
The Q's are so wide in a 5-10 band EQ as to make them virtually worthless as anything but a glorified tone control to make "disco smiles" on. Unless you are running some seriously cut rate equipment, first focus on room set up. You can make modest adjustments, but as another poster mentioned, anything more than 2-3 dB of correction isn't going to work well.
avguytx
Lunatic Member
In a perfect world, that would be great but we don't listen to pink noise in an anechoic chamber searching for a flat response on our music. A room tuned with a 1/3 octave rta and equalization sounds like crap. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. But I know what you mean. Everyone hears different no matter what's preached. And I listen to a broad range of music that would change about every other listening time.
JURB
Super Member
First of all, many speakers start rolling off around 60-70 Hz, however the answer is not to use the boost there because then the EQ adds to the rolloff. If possible only use a little bit on the lowest control, and take the rest of them down. Not all the way, you don't need nor want 12 dB, partly because the farther you go the less flat the better part of the range is.
Mine usually end up looking like a check mark. That is partly due to my hearing though, which needs the high end boost. Right now on my main system I don't need any EQ with the subwoofer. Takes care of all that rolloff easily.
I hooked my Mother up with an EQ and amp for her TV. She has these little Bose speakers that really sound good. they were not cheap. Seems Bose has some good models and some cheap models. I don't even know the model on thesd but they were about $250 back in the early 1980s. they got pretty smooth response and enough bass to shake the floor even though they are smaller than a toaster.
However the issue os more hearing than flattening the room so the EQ is set a birt on the radical side. On a seven band I got the first range up kinda high, the second one pulled almost all the way down and the rest in a pretty much straigh line ending up with the last range up pretty high.
So that's the"best" setting for that aplication. If you just want to clean up the bass, pulling down the second band of a seven band usuallu will take out alot of the boominess if the room or the speakers sound too "tubby".
Now in the bedroom, I got a simmilar setup, the EQ on the PC which feeds everything is selt to about the Flectcher Munson curve. there is no loudness comp on the amp I am using right now, this curve, I think is a ittle better than most loudness comp. It is a bit less severe than some, plus it stays put at higher volume. Actually sounds pretty good. Since they're sealed system speakers it is easy to get that sweet bottom end. As with the system on Ma's TV, the low mid is cut and that realy helps inteligibility because the harmonics in the human voice are not muddied by to much from like 200-400 Hz.
Soe people say that EQ is bad, even using the tone controls is bad. Everything should be flat. I do not agree. I suppose there are ties like when auditioning speakers or a few other thnings it comes in handy as sort of a refernce, but unless you live in an anechoic chamber and have very expensive speakers, your response is not flat anyway.
Even the source is not flat. On a mixing board, which almost all your music goes through at some point, there are usually three way tone controls on each channel individually. So you are not actually hearing the sound, you are hearing what the sound engineer think is right.
Don't get me wrong, these guys know what they're doinf but you can hear differences. No two of them will ever mix down a piece exactly the same.
Don't do that smile or "V" thing. It may sound better on some material but not all. I think the sound you get like that can be tiring.
One thing you might bre able to do, lmaybe givew it a try, is tune your FM to off station to get the noise. Now take each EQ control and see how uch apparent range it has. the ones with more range, lower. The ones with less range, boost. And don't go all the way. The control is there for a reason, if all the way up or down was best they would be switches. Also, even though the Q of he bands is ower than on a 10 band, on most EQs it gets alot worse when you take the controls to the extremes of the ranges. that is bad because they are NEVER at just the right frequency. In fact I have modified EQs for specific venues. Well two anyway. But really, there is a good reason pros use 31 band EQs, which are 1/3 octave. Part of the reason is to get rid of the feedback with the minimum coloration of the sound, and for that the more bands the better. Plus sound reinforcement speakers are sometimes notoriously un-flat in response. and alot of them are ported and have no insulation.
the reason for not using insulation is because they can be felt out in the rain on the way to or from a gig. Instead they try to use materials with the least resonance. As a result they are very sensitive to acoustic conditions where they play and that might be at many places.
On the audiophile end the problems are not all that bad so a ten band per channel is usually enough, and alot of people get by on less. I prefer the ten band because it seems alot more useful. Like low end ? Well you can boost 31 Hz without touching 62Hz. This can come in handy but watch it, don't go bottoming out those woofers.
Mine usually end up looking like a check mark. That is partly due to my hearing though, which needs the high end boost. Right now on my main system I don't need any EQ with the subwoofer. Takes care of all that rolloff easily.
I hooked my Mother up with an EQ and amp for her TV. She has these little Bose speakers that really sound good. they were not cheap. Seems Bose has some good models and some cheap models. I don't even know the model on thesd but they were about $250 back in the early 1980s. they got pretty smooth response and enough bass to shake the floor even though they are smaller than a toaster.
However the issue os more hearing than flattening the room so the EQ is set a birt on the radical side. On a seven band I got the first range up kinda high, the second one pulled almost all the way down and the rest in a pretty much straigh line ending up with the last range up pretty high.
So that's the"best" setting for that aplication. If you just want to clean up the bass, pulling down the second band of a seven band usuallu will take out alot of the boominess if the room or the speakers sound too "tubby".
Now in the bedroom, I got a simmilar setup, the EQ on the PC which feeds everything is selt to about the Flectcher Munson curve. there is no loudness comp on the amp I am using right now, this curve, I think is a ittle better than most loudness comp. It is a bit less severe than some, plus it stays put at higher volume. Actually sounds pretty good. Since they're sealed system speakers it is easy to get that sweet bottom end. As with the system on Ma's TV, the low mid is cut and that realy helps inteligibility because the harmonics in the human voice are not muddied by to much from like 200-400 Hz.
Soe people say that EQ is bad, even using the tone controls is bad. Everything should be flat. I do not agree. I suppose there are ties like when auditioning speakers or a few other thnings it comes in handy as sort of a refernce, but unless you live in an anechoic chamber and have very expensive speakers, your response is not flat anyway.
Even the source is not flat. On a mixing board, which almost all your music goes through at some point, there are usually three way tone controls on each channel individually. So you are not actually hearing the sound, you are hearing what the sound engineer think is right.
Don't get me wrong, these guys know what they're doinf but you can hear differences. No two of them will ever mix down a piece exactly the same.
Don't do that smile or "V" thing. It may sound better on some material but not all. I think the sound you get like that can be tiring.
One thing you might bre able to do, lmaybe givew it a try, is tune your FM to off station to get the noise. Now take each EQ control and see how uch apparent range it has. the ones with more range, lower. The ones with less range, boost. And don't go all the way. The control is there for a reason, if all the way up or down was best they would be switches. Also, even though the Q of he bands is ower than on a 10 band, on most EQs it gets alot worse when you take the controls to the extremes of the ranges. that is bad because they are NEVER at just the right frequency. In fact I have modified EQs for specific venues. Well two anyway. But really, there is a good reason pros use 31 band EQs, which are 1/3 octave. Part of the reason is to get rid of the feedback with the minimum coloration of the sound, and for that the more bands the better. Plus sound reinforcement speakers are sometimes notoriously un-flat in response. and alot of them are ported and have no insulation.
the reason for not using insulation is because they can be felt out in the rain on the way to or from a gig. Instead they try to use materials with the least resonance. As a result they are very sensitive to acoustic conditions where they play and that might be at many places.
On the audiophile end the problems are not all that bad so a ten band per channel is usually enough, and alot of people get by on less. I prefer the ten band because it seems alot more useful. Like low end ? Well you can boost 31 Hz without touching 62Hz. This can come in handy but watch it, don't go bottoming out those woofers.
You didn't understand. I said that EQUALIZER setting should be flat, not RTA result. Which effectively means - no equalizer is needed.
JoeESP9
ESL's & tubes since 83
Having used room equalization for more than 30 years I know that for me a flat response out to 20KHz results in a harsh and fatiguing sound. IME a gentle roll off starting around 10KHz results in a much more pleasant sound.
Currently I use equalization only from 85Hz down. Room treatments and speaker positioning are adequate for the rest of the audio spectrum.
Currently I use equalization only from 85Hz down. Room treatments and speaker positioning are adequate for the rest of the audio spectrum.
And there (under 85 Hz) you need more than graphic equalizer - 1/3 octave won't cut, you need 1/24 or better plus phase adjustment.