Listening to MP3s: EQ or No EQ?
Reply #13 – 2003-05-10 21:39:56
,May 10 2003 - 05:17 PM] d2e : Permit me to say that I find strange that, being you a Dj (that's the part I'm not sure if I have understood correctly), you wonder why you should, or shouldn't use an EQ. Even if you do it at home, I'm sure you have an equalizer, and sure you use the eq or bass/treble gains of the mixer table, to accomodate the music sound to the room/equipment. Been said this, the best thing you can do is leave the music as it is, because the equipment would have been (more or less, depending on the place you're playing) been accomodated to reproduce a flat signal, or simply the way the people there wants. If you pre-equalize the CD's that you want to play, you're changing the rules, and you might find yourself trying to remove or add sounds with the table gains, and you cannot. But the real problem is being the source MP3's (or in general, lossy codecs). When you equalize, you're changing the gains of the bands, which might make distortions hearable when they weren't. Doing this at the final stage (hardware eq's) might sound better than doing it in software, although I won't enter in details, because I don't know them. In the end: It's generally not desired to pre-EQ the music when it has to be played in a different place. (I did this sometimes to hear the music on my car, but just because the controls of bass and treble weren't that great) To hear it at home, or in your usual place, the best is to have the harware well equalized. If that can't be done, then software can help. Note that some songs might require special equing, because of bad mastering or just because you like better sounding different. (example, the typical "dance" preset, pumping bass and treble). Hope this doesn't add more confusion. (It seems I'm not completely awake today ) You are right. I agree with you