A diversion

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Master your EQ, make your music sound clearer

Yes, the EQ, or equalizer. The average person usually doesn’t bother messing with it, but if you want to get the clearest sound for every song, you need to do more than just use the presets. I’m no music technician, but I get pretty anal about the quality of my music. Hell, I hate mp3s that come in less than 256 kbps because I can almost always hear the compression artifacts. The reason I wrote this is because there weren’t that many guides on the subject when I googled it a long time ago. [more]

In your basic graphical EQ, you have a few bars that represent the various frequency bands. These start on neutral, neither negating or boosting the signal produced by the song. The leftmost sliders are the lower frequencies, and the rightmost sliders are the highest frequencies. In most songs (except for most classical music, electronic and IDM), they won’t go to extremes, but you can take advantage of the EQ to change the tonal qualities of the song to your liking.

Whatever you are listening to your music through also plays a huge part in the tonal qualities of your sound. The size and shape of your speakers, their location and surroundings affect your sound a lot, and an EQ can help you to sort this out, after you have arranged your speakers properly. Experiment with the placement of your speakers. Most people just point them forward in an enclosed desk, but tilting them diagonally away (about 45 degrees or so) from the monitor changes the sound ever so slightly. This can wash out a bit of the treble, which your average desktop speakers seem to produce too much of, and bring out the bass. You use the boards of the desk (walls, in my case) to make the sound reverberate off of it, and turn it all into one large speaker.

One more thing I forgot to mention about the graphical EQ: the preamp.

Basically, when you use the band sliders on the EQ, you are either amplifying or turning down a signal, and that signal determines how much of it the speaker needs to output. If a given song, for instance, already has a good deal of middle and treble frequencies, and you boost those anyway because you just want to get brighter tones, you may get a washed out, chopped up, and distorted sound.

What is happening is that the signal being sent to the speakers is getting cut off by an imaginary bottlenecked “pipeline”. The input is greater than what the output can handle. This is where the preamp comes in. If you drop the preamp a few decibels, it’s like lowering the EQ across all bands, with respect to the settings you already have on the sliders. So you boosted your 12K band to +12dB? Drop the preamp 3 decibels, and you have a net gain of +9dB on the 12K band. Magical, isn’t it? Think of the preamp slider as your zero, the 0dB level that normally applies to the other sliders.

Lastly, try experimenting with your equalizer to figure out what you want out of your sounds. There is no universal EQ setting because there are different speakers, different songs, and different people. It’s really the only way to understand why you should use it. I guess you can just turn off the EQ and ignore it, but you’ll be missing out on making a whole lot of awesome songs sound even better.