Drew Wallner

Low budget equalization idea, neat or crazy?

Please feel free to tell me if and why this would be CRAZY, but...

I have a modest HT setup, fairly low budget. A friend of mine who's way more into audio than I am is all hyped to come over and play with ETF on his notebook and get my room all dialed in. I'm interested, and think it would be fun and educational as well as effective - however my setup consists basically of an Onkyo 601 driving some older Klipsch speakers and a Polk powered sub.

I'm not using any "components" and so really the only thing we can stick a (line level) parametric EQ on is the sub channel. However after thinking about it I came up with this insane idea. What if I bought six of those really inexpensive little parametric EQ's they make for automotive use (presuming I could find some that do speaker level) and then hooked them up to a nice DC power supply and shoved this in my rack? I could run each output channel from the Onkyo through one and have an amazingly tweakable system for only about $200 or so more than I've already spent.

Is this nuts?

Are high level EQ's just evil in the amounts of additional distortion they introduce versus low level ones?

Is there a fundamental reason not to do this that a n00b like me is missing?

Thanks a ton for any advice (or well-explained hearty laughter).

Dave Milne

Since the connection to your powered sub is indeed "line level" (1-5 vrms) you could, in fact, hook a little parametric EQ in here. And this is not a bad idea. If you surf over to the DIY section of this forum, you'll find many doing this very thing with the Behringer Feedback Destroyer (BFD). It's a very flexible digital parametric equalizer available for about $120. I'd go this route rather than the automotive solution. The BFD will be far more adjustable, sound better, and not require an outboard power supply.

Now with regard to the other channels:
This cannot be done. A speaker-level parametric EQ doesn't exist. It would either be a roomfull of huge inductors and capacitors or it would just knock the signal back to line level and you'd need to add a power amplifier.
And you really don't want to put active EQ into the signal path of your main speakers. It would need to be much higher quality than either the automotive units or the BFD to keep from degrading the signal quality. For a sub, it doesn't matter, but for mains, keep the signal path as clean as possible.

Ned

It would be a rather junky pile of parts in your rack. 3 Behringer feedback destroyers could do 6 channels and would cost around $300-375.

Drew Wallner

Okay, sounds like it was a dumb idea then. I misunderstood something I read thinking that both graphic and parametric EQ's came in both high and line level flavors.

The mention of the "Feedback Destroyer" seems to back that up, it looks like an awesome unit for the price but is meant for line level use.

The receiver I have is an all-in-one unit and that sort of thing just isn't possible. To EQ my channels independantly at line level I would need a decoder or a decoding DVD player and I'm not interested in that right now.

Thanks!

FeisalK

you could use the zone2 preouts -> BFD -> 2ch power amp and EQ your front 2 channels

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Drew Wallner

Actually I'm using zone 2 for a legitimate zone 2, my living room. Oops!