DEQ2496 amazing! Personal review (1 Viewer)

[Chu Gai]

Not as far as I know. On a personal level, I simply appreciated his efforts. Like James and others who go the extra yar such as that comprehensive sub comparison, I am personally grateful for their sharing of the information that they've gleaned and gone to great lengths to type up. It's much more beneficial to the audio community than reading about how placing specially tuned blocks of wood in strategic locations suddenly resulted in a tightening of the bass and a wonderful coherence.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

James, you’re one of the smart ones from the pro world who realizes that home audio is in many respects a different ball game. You’d be surprised how many practicing pros have gone down in flames here when they came around trying to dispense the edicts of pro audio psycoacoustics (did I use that word right? ) as gospel for the residential environment.

Aside from the house curve (which I’ll discuss later) the most obvious difference that comes to mind is that ruler-smooth response above the sub frequencies is not especially desirable – at least not in my experience.

For instance, since you’ve spent some time in concert venues with sound reinforcement speakers, you’ve undoubtedly noticed it’s characteristic for them to have something of an aggressive “edge.” I’ve always found it to be fatiguing, especially since these ears have long since passed the 40-year mark.

However, several years ago I did a show and decided to take care of that little “problem.” All it took was a little downward adjustment of the EQ in the 2kHz or 4kHz range, if I recall.

Well, it certainly sounded smoother, but it wasn’t “better.” The problem was that without that “edge” the vocals suddenly weren’t cutting through the mix as distinctly as they should. And the distortion guitar (it was a rock group) lost its edge and texture.

But I’ve found quite the opposite to be true in the home environment, where high fidelity is the order of the day. Here, smooth response is definitely what you want to shoot for.

For instance, my RTA revealed my speakers had hot spot of about 6dB at 6kHz. Reducing it definitely made an improvement in sound quality – smoother, less “tizz.” However, I did find that reducing it the full 6dB gave me what I had seen in the example above – it sounded a little dulled. Dialing it in at –4dB did the trick – improved, smoother response with the right amount of definition.

Regarding house curve, the rule of thumb is that the smaller the room, the more severe the curve needs to be. I found this out the hard way the first time I tried to pink noise and EQ a large church. I initially dialed in a curve pretty much identical to what I had at home, and WOW, the bass was way overkill!

The slope not only had to be reduced, but the point where the slope began turned out to be different, too. At home the slope starts getting aggressive at about 100-125Hz. Here, it started pretty close to the bottom, at something like 40-63Hz. That’s what it took to get things where my reference CDs sounded like that they do at home (i.e., had the same balance).

I don’t know if this helps any, but it’s sure fun to talk about.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

 

[Chu Gai]

I'll go along with the idea of a more moderate notching as leading to greater pleasure but I think that has more to do with the fact you haven't chopped the incident sound as much. Interesting stuff though.