Oct 10, 2008 09:31 am I have always recorded as flat as possible into the PC then did all the EQing there...
Outboard EQ?
Posted on Oct 10, 2008 09:30 am
Bleak
A small pie will soon be eaten
Member Since: Aug 26, 2004
I went and bought one of these on E-bay
www.behringer.com/GEQ3102/index.cfm?lang=ENG
I currently apply EQ to my tracks as a part of the pre-mastering process.
I thought I'd try and enhance the signal via the audio chain.
i.e - VOX
Pre-amp
Compressor
EQ
Does anyone use outboard EQ for recording?
Not sure if i've just wasted my money
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Oct 10, 2008 09:31 am I have always recorded as flat as possible into the PC then did all the EQing there...
Oct 10, 2008 10:09 am ^ Yep. It would make a nice monitor EQ though. That's where I'd use it.
Oct 10, 2008 10:10 am yeah, still useful for ringing out a room and what not...
Oct 10, 2008 06:11 pm Quote:
useful for ringing out a room
Important note: In a live setting - Never try to EQ a room into "accuracy" -- It's not possible. In a bad room, the most you can hope for is to make the system less accurate to compensate for deficiencies in the space. You will never make a bad room "okay" using EQ...
To some extent, with a enough swing and tight enough filtering, you could make a space (several cubic inches, maybe one cubic foot) "accurate" - But (A) not with a typical 31 band +/- 15dB EQ and (2) once you move your head out of that space (or you try using the ear on the other side of your head) it's not even close anymore.
Oct 10, 2008 06:14 pm For those folks that don't have control rooms, dedicated studio rooms and the like (you know, typical home recording musicians) an EQ can be infinitely useful in controlling a possible bad frequency or two that the room you are using may have...
Oct 10, 2008 08:36 pm mmm, i always thought, do the eq-ing in the software, but if you know what you are doing then eq-ing as you go in, especially for guitars seems to be common.
i dont know about common, but some reading i've been doing, its makes sense, if you know how, to seek out the any crapy frequencies you arent that keen on, and do a "little" tweaking there.
Man, im no where near that yet, but i can see the benefits.
i guess it makes it easier to get the compression nicer/tighter, if you dont have certain frequencies killing the mix before you have a chance to pull in the whole thing.
having said that, then i guess compressing on the wy in would have that same benefit too.
i know once you record like this you cant change it, but, once you knew what you were doing, its gotta be a better way...doesnt it??
there's been alot of times i've done guitars, then you cant change that particular mix either, and that's eqing and compressing after recording.
So i guess its trail and error either way you do it.
Oct 10, 2008 09:01 pm just remember if you EQ it going in, it can't be undone...
Oct 10, 2008 09:27 pm Use the EQ with your favorite CD, tailor it to how that CD is supposed to sound, and forget about it.
Ears. Unless the waveform looks visually unusual.
Oct 10, 2008 10:32 pm For the record, you would not want an EQ on your monitor's. The only live EQ I run is on the large format speakers for playing live in here, otherwise everything goes in flat as a pancake, natural as it can be. Then if need the EQ comes out when mixing after the track is recorded.
To quote a famous web guy.
Quote:
just remember if you EQ it going in, it can't be undone...
Oct 10, 2008 10:46 pm That's what i hate about my final mixdowns....they cant be undone.
Ha Ha ha
Oct 10, 2008 11:16 pm Quote:
For those folks that don't have control rooms, dedicated studio rooms and the like (you know, typical home recording musicians) an EQ can be infinitely useful in controlling a possible bad frequency or two that the room you are using may have...
This is what I was getting at -- That is totally and completely untrue. EQ absolutely will *not* correct a bad room. No way, no how, not possible.
The best possible scenario will mask peaks in a room (exactly as you would in a live situation) -- That means that if you have a peak at (for example) 100Hz that's +12dB, you can cut 12dB of 100Hz out with the EQ. Of course, you aren't going to be able to hear 100Hz accurately anymore except at that single cubic inch of space in the room. And if there's a peak at 100Hz, elsewhere (could be only a foot away) there will probably be a null point of maybe 30 or 35dB. No EQ has that sort of swing, and no speaker I know of could handle the 35dB boost at 100Hz to make up for that one spot in the room without liberating its voice coil. That null is going to occur at particular points in the room. Move a foot, and now the 100Hz is 35dB too hot (and the speakers are probably on fire).
A room is either reasonably accurate and consistent or it's not. EQ will not change the physics of the room. The *ONLY* effective way to deal with the problem is to fix the room (generally with broadband trapping).
In a relatively accurate room, you can use an EQ to tailor the speaker response to what you find pleasant to listen to (also done to some extent in live settings). But again, that doesn't change the physics of the room - It just changes how the speaker reproduces what it's fed.
Don't get me wrong here - I'm not dissing home studios - Some of the best studios I've ever been in are home studios. But a room is either decent, or it's not. It's most definitely the biggest liability of a home studio -- Too many people throw foam all over the walls and expect it to make it better (when it actually makes it considerably worse). And I feel very sorry for the people who fall for the "Automatic Room Correction" or whatever some (otherwise reasonable) speaker manufacturers are pushing lately. All those speakers do is analyze a room at several positions, finds the room nodes (which anyone could do by themselves with a calculator) and then makes the speakers less accurate by reducing those nodal frequencies. So now, the engineer can't hear them. You could have 60 cycle hum taking over in a recording and not have any idea because the room had a node on one axis at 60Hz.
No EQ has ever made a room more accurate. No EQ will ever make a room more accurate. Making the room more accurate will make the room more accurate. It's not hard - and there is no substitute.
More here if anyone's bored...
www.massivemastering.com/...Room_Setup.html
Oct 10, 2008 11:42 pm Did I add to fallacies about sound reproduction? Sorry about that.
Oct 10, 2008 11:45 pm some good info there as usual Massive.
cheers for that.
can i ask this question though.
with a close mic on guitars with say sm57, how much room noise will you pick up?
Oct 10, 2008 11:48 pm It will help create a better listening environment from a less pleasant one...I didn't say anything about changing the physical structure of the room...get a grip. I am so sick and tired of people assuming everybody has access to perfect rooms and perfect equipment. An EQ can make a better situation out of a worse one...is it the perfect answer, no, can it help, yes.
Oct 11, 2008 12:13 am Damn to me for not typing "read the sarcasm.."
Oct 11, 2008 01:04 am Quote:
with a close mic on guitars with say sm57, how much room noise will you pick up?
Totally dependent on the ambient volume in the space vs. the direct volume at the mic. Usually, fairly negligible *if* the cabinet is closed-mic'd and not in a bad spot in the room (the ".38" rule applies there also).
Quote:
It will help create a better listening environment from a less pleasant one...I didn't say anything about changing the physical structure of the room...get a grip. I am so sick and tired of people assuming everybody has access to perfect rooms and perfect equipment. An EQ can make a better situation out of a worse one...is it the perfect answer, no, can it help, yes.
And I'm saying that it will not. Period. It can not. All it can do is make the speakers less accurate than they are. An EQ will almost surely make a bad situation worse every single time if the goal is accuracy.
I'm most definitely not assuming everyone has access to great rooms -- Take the traps out of this room and it's utter crap. And an EQ won't fix it.
I know plenty of people (I was one of them once) who shoot their rooms and EQ it their speakers until the response is "flatter" -- All they've done is taken the peaks out of the speakers. They've done nothing to improve the accuracy of the room - They *did* make it "more pleasant" sounding - At the very high cost of making the system far less accurate than it was. But the room still has the same nodes, same peaks, same null points. Nothing changed except that now they can hear less than they did before.
If you want to correct an inaccurate speaker in an accurate room, EQ it. I used to have a set of monitors that were about a half dB more than I wanted at around 3k. 1/2dB later, I was fine.
But if you have an inaccurate room, the only thing you can do to make it more accurate is to fix the room. You can EQ it all you want - It's not going to make it more accurate. In 25 years of doing this, I've yet to find one single situation where adding an EQ actually helped. Not one. I've found plenty of situations where it *felt* better - but was *less* accurate.
Any studio - Home, pro or otherwise, will only ever be as good as its monitoring chain. And any monitoring chain, whether a $1k home theatre, a $20k mastering rig or a $200,000 audiophile system will only ever be as accurate as the room they're in.
I understand just as well as the next guy that many home studios (heck, many professional studios) don't have properly treated spaces. That doesn't change the laws of physics.
What makes the problem even worse is that the average home studio has a much higher mountain to climb - You can rig up a 2500 cubic foot control room and maybe get away with 40 square feet of broadband trapping. Set up the average 11-1200 cubic foot bedroom and you need several times the mass in less than half the space.
Even this room -- At around 1500 cubic feet (pretty small for a mastering room), took around 250 square feet of broadband and low bass trapping to get it under control.
If I could have done anything even remotely similar with an EQ, believe me - I wouldn't have hesitated for a second.
Oct 11, 2008 10:25 am Keep sayin it, I disagree...it's not the best way, I'll say that, but saying you can't try or it won't help is simply not true.
Eh, at the end of the day, it's really not even worth arguing about, everybody has their methods.
Oct 11, 2008 10:28 pm I'm not saying to not try -- I *am* saying, and can prove beyond any possible doubt, that it won't help. It's not physically possible, period. Nothing will change that.
A lot of people *think* it helps - I'm sorry, they're wrong. Honestly, I wish that wasn't the case. I'd love to be able to actually make a space more accurate by using an EQ. But it won't happen.
You can liken a bad spot in a room (and rooms tend to have several bad areas of differing frequencies) to someone who is color blind -- That is, someone who's rods and cones do not (repeat, DO NOT) react to certain colors. Red for example -- So, you have a guy who can't see red (or a space in a room that can't support 100Hz). It's not like you can turn up the red light in the room to compensate for it - You can pour every red light you can find in there and it's not going to "color correct" his sight - He can't see red - End of story. The spot in the room can't support 100Hz - End of story.
You have as much of a chance as making a room more accurate with an EQ as you have making a color blind person see correctly by adjusting the lighting.
But unlike correcting someone's vision, you can correct a room by changing the physics of the room. It's reasonably simple, it's relatively cheap, and it works - every time it's tried.
Oct 11, 2008 11:15 pm Man, I thought I overthink.
Sound is what you perceive it to be. It's good if you hear it as such.
Nitey nite.
Oct 12, 2008 03:58 am Thanks for the feedback and indeed the colorful conversation :)
It's in the rack now but i suspect i'll whack it back on Ebay.
Shame, Looks impressive!
Oct 12, 2008 08:17 am Quote:
Man, I thought I overthink.
hahaha, yeah, that was kinda my thought...there are some folks that can suck the fun out of a friggin carnival...
Oct 12, 2008 02:23 pm I'm not trying to "suck the fun" out of anything - I'm trying to get someone to stop himself from making one of the most common mistakes on one of the most common misconceptions in audio.
I do the same thing when people put foam all over their walls and wonder why their recordings sound "muddy" all of a sudden.
I'm not saying there isn't *somewhat* of a workaround -- The space I had before this one was horrible - absolutely horrible. Probably worse than many home studios. It was so bad that there physically wasn't space to add enough broadband absorption to tune the room.
The workaround was putting in as much broadband trapping as possible (there was only room for 6 traps and the room wouldn't allow me to have them where they were really needed), having the room shot (the guy would actually laugh every time a graph came up) and finding the mast accurate single point in the room. It wasn't even close to accurate, but it was the best spot there was. Not surprisingly, it was at the .38 point from the short wall (but I wasn't aware of this 'rule of thumb' at the time).
And (also "of course" in retrospect) the *best* spot in the room was a mere foot or so from the absolute *worst* spot in the room. INCHES would dictate whether I was making the right move or screwing something up completely.
In any case, certainly nothing an EQ would help in the least.
Oct 12, 2008 02:45 pm Quote:
I do the same thing when people put foam all over their walls
Yeah, cuz everybody knows egg crates work better...
Oct 12, 2008 06:37 pm I think the whole thing is being over-thunk. (yes, I know its not a real word)
The point of the EQ is to give the illusion of accuracy for that particular person. To make it sound better to the ears of the listener.
I think we all know you cannot physically change it with an EQ, I'm pretty sure we all know that. But you can change the aural experience for those listening with the EQ so it gives the illusion that you are looking for.
Oct 12, 2008 10:31 pm Interesting to see where this thread went and yet it provides all this useful information.
MM is right of course, still I can see dB and Noize's point. Especially since the way we experience music ultimately is strictly personal. All we can do is strive for what sounds perfect to our ears in the environment we happen to be in.
Oct 13, 2008 02:35 am tis the trickiest bit, we all perceive sound differently, well at least we think we do.
it is of course only one thing, always, its just what one person likes, compared to another.
such a complex thing in the end.
what makes you hurl might taste ok to me, but to appeal to the basic senses it at least has to taste like food to start with.
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