EQ's... why doesnt everybody have one?


Just browsing around the systems on this site, i knoticed that very few have equalizers. I realize some claim they introduce unacceptable noise but i would hardly call my Furman Q-2312, at %>.01 20Hz-40kHz, unacceptable. This $200 piece of equiptment ($100 on sale at musiciansfriend.com) replaces several thousand dollars in assembling a perfectly linear system in perfectly linear room, and in my opinion, accomplishes the task better than any room design could no matter how well engineered. It brought my system (onkyo reciever, NHT SB-3 speakers and Sony CD changer) to a level i could not have dreamed. It extends the SB-3's frequency response by at least 10 Hz to a satisfying 30 Hz without any rolloff or sacrifice in clarity, but the greatest improvement was definately in the Mid-range, around the SB-3s crossover frequency of 2.6kHz. The clarity of vocals, strings, guitars, brass... anything in this range rivals that of uneq'd systems costing well into the thousands of dollars... my total cost; $800. One of the more supprising differences is a marked improvement in immaging, it think this might have to do with eliminating several resonances in the right channel caused by my back wall (the left back wall has a curtain over it). The second my dad heard the difference he got on my computer to buy one for himself, he couldnt even wait to get back to his own, he then kicked me outa the listening chair and wouldnt get up for the better part of an hour.
-Dan-
dk89

Showing 6 responses by unsound

The new TacT gear promises to adjust room correction relative to volume as suggested by Fletcher-Munson et al. I'm very interested in this type of gear. That the TacT gear can be kept in the digital domain right through cross-overs and amplification is most interesting. Too bad the power options are limited. Some have argued that by adjusting for the room effects one can't help but pervert the initial primary sound. The counter argument is that the majority of sound is effected by the room. Countered by the brain has the ability to seperate the two so long as there is enough time between original and reflected sound. Most seem to agree that below 150 to 200 Hz that this type of correction will be beneficial to most. Does a high quality digital room correction device that only effects sound below this point exist?
I was told by TacT that one couldn't use their room correction software to specificaly target frequencies (such as bass). One would have to allow the entire frequency response to be corrected and then one could over correct back to the original uncorrected response above the desired corrected bass frequencies. Perhaps I'm just being a typical neurotic audiophile but to my way of thinking it would be similar to writting a verse on a clean sheet of paper, writting a new verse over that verse and then erasing it and rewritting the original verse over the erased segement. Of couse while this is going on one would have to be carefull not to effect surrounding verses. The results of which probably wouldn't be as pristine as the original verse written on the origianl clean sheet of paper. BTW, I would love to be wrong about this.
Drubin, that might not be an issue if one's speakers were already time coherent.
Kal, would I be correct in assuming that the parametric eq only works via subjective input and not via objective evaluation? If thats the case I suspect that true correction could be laborious.
Cinematic_systems, the post you addressed to me, if I understand it correctly, is actually good news indeed. The promise of this technology is very exciting!