I’m pretty much a big believer in (good quality) EQ. I now use digital, parametric EQ. The problem with it has always been the noise factor...push too much in the upper mids and you get hash, too much in the midbass or lower mids and you get mud or colorations. Push too much in the low bass and maybe the amp starts to sweat. But then I happened to find a great (but expensive) power treatment solution. One of the benefits, apart from taming all the digital and ss nasties, was curing all those EQ limitations.
But I’ve been using EQ in one form or another for almost 45 yrs now and with prior systems that we’re not nearly as good as my current one. As things progressed over the years, the one thing I learned was that for whatever problem you could want to use EQ for, you could, in the end, invariably trace the roots of that problem back, in effect, to things that could be adjusted, replaced or otherwise fixed without ever having to resort to EQ...even if going that route would cost more, perhaps even significantly more.
But I no longer believe in using EQ to help with "bad recordings" per se. I regard all of that (as above) as some sort of unresolved playback problem of one sort or another...there’s no such thing to me actually as "bad recordings" - they amount to about 1% of my CD’s at current. With my past systems they seemed more like 35-40%. Things have progressed enough for me that I don’t have "problem" recordings and actually have less need for room correction, gear correction, etc. My dependency on EQ has not dropped to zero, I still use a little for the bass and a touch on the top end, but that’s all, anymore these days.
EQ is a terrific (if not indispensable) band-aid to have on hand in the beginning, but in the end, to me, maybe that’s all it really should be...just a band-aid...useful maybe, but not essential. In a "perfect system", EQ would not be needed at all...but then, who among us has the perfect system? Yet, the closer we get to that, I think the less we need it...maybe a good thing, I’d say...it depends on how you weigh out the costs of fixing things the right way vs just using EQ.
But I’ve been using EQ in one form or another for almost 45 yrs now and with prior systems that we’re not nearly as good as my current one. As things progressed over the years, the one thing I learned was that for whatever problem you could want to use EQ for, you could, in the end, invariably trace the roots of that problem back, in effect, to things that could be adjusted, replaced or otherwise fixed without ever having to resort to EQ...even if going that route would cost more, perhaps even significantly more.
But I no longer believe in using EQ to help with "bad recordings" per se. I regard all of that (as above) as some sort of unresolved playback problem of one sort or another...there’s no such thing to me actually as "bad recordings" - they amount to about 1% of my CD’s at current. With my past systems they seemed more like 35-40%. Things have progressed enough for me that I don’t have "problem" recordings and actually have less need for room correction, gear correction, etc. My dependency on EQ has not dropped to zero, I still use a little for the bass and a touch on the top end, but that’s all, anymore these days.
EQ is a terrific (if not indispensable) band-aid to have on hand in the beginning, but in the end, to me, maybe that’s all it really should be...just a band-aid...useful maybe, but not essential. In a "perfect system", EQ would not be needed at all...but then, who among us has the perfect system? Yet, the closer we get to that, I think the less we need it...maybe a good thing, I’d say...it depends on how you weigh out the costs of fixing things the right way vs just using EQ.