How do you judge an EQ?

[Christian Budde]

I also created some examples from a "mystery" eq (high end stuff) that I can unfortunately not tell more about at this point in time (I'm not hyping it! no! )

I think I know, what brand they are, but I'll keep my mouth shut. Now that the frequency response is unveiled, maybe someone else likes to guess.

Christian

P.S.: There are some treasonous details. If you find them, then it's easy.

[gsoto]

This thread was very instructive to me.
As a newbie, I have a question to add: how much time and experience took you to develop the ear to hear the subtle differences and be capable of judging an EQ, from the time you started messing with audio and recording stuff?

[bmanic]

I keep learning all the time. Every time I get a new toy to play with I compare it to the ones I own on program material that I'm familiar with. This is a great way to learn and to start hearing the subtle differences. However, like I said earlier, I can't really figure out what is going on with different EQs, mainly, what is the "damage" that is done on a lot of plugins and also cheap hardware. Any ideas? Christian?

I'll post some more examples after mid-summer so stay tuned!

Cheers!
bManic

[kmonkey]

You are using glisseq here do you ?

[Barbarossa]

This thread was very instructive to me.
As a newbie, I have a question to add: how much time and experience took you to develop the ear to hear the subtle differences and be capable of judging an EQ, from the time you started messing with audio and recording stuff?

I guess it was around 12 years or a bit longer until it thought to hear different results by using different EQs, no matter how long i tweaked them. As an electrotechnician i have never believed in "magic" and thought, i could make every EQ sound the same, if i only try long enough.
That was totally wrong, but it helped me to develop the ear.

[hoffy]

hmm. i judge an EQ by setting them both up to do exactly the same thing on a peice of audio. And whichever sounds better, is better (to me). I stick with Elemental Audio Equim, which took over recently from the Waves Renaissance EQ (which was my standard EQ for years). For the most part however, the built in EQ's in my host (Pro Tools or Cubase, depending on what i'm doing) will suit. Especially if it's just filtering out the bottom/top end of a signal.

It's a fuckin' great idea to test different EQ's on a variety of different audio. I've tried free EQ's and decided they're shit based on my usual method but never even considered that they might be better suited to other tasks. Oh well, you learn something new every day

[krank]

Not much help I know but one of the reasons why I'm not a big fan of Live's built in Eq's unless using them as fx processing tools.

Can you elaborate on what you think of EQ4? I've been using it for intense, detailed tweaking only because it's so accessible. Like getting an old drum sample to sound less noisy, with lots of narrow-band cuts. I'm not sure I'm too happy with the results though, but I'm still at a stage where I tend to consider my skills/ears lacking rather than the gear. Should I move on to something else? Wish I could use posihfopit, but I'm on a mac. Any input would be much appreciated.

[oursvince]

This thread was very instructive to me.
As a newbie, I have a question to add: how much time and experience took you to develop the ear to hear the subtle differences and be capable of judging an EQ, from the time you started messing with audio and recording stuff?

To judge eqs I put the same adjustments to the differents eqs I want to try and experiment on my differents tracks ( guitar, bass,voice...) and keep the one whith better sound, sometimes an eq can works good for an instrument and not for an other one, the color you get's always different, it depends the result you want

[Christian Budde]

I keep learning all the time. Every time I get a new toy to play with I compare it to the ones I own on program material that I'm familiar with. This is a great way to learn and to start hearing the subtle differences. However, like I said earlier, I can't really figure out what is going on with different EQs, mainly, what is the "damage" that is done on a lot of plugins and also cheap hardware. Any ideas? Christian?

One "damage" of plugins (and digital hardware) is, that developers quantize the internal state variables too low. This will result in limit cycles. You can hear a very extreme version of this if you are using the 'broken' filters of 'Electri-Q'. With them the state variables are quantized to (i'm not sure anymore, but I think) 6Bit. That's very low, but the reason I build them was to hear how limit cycles may sound like.
Other "damage" is, that especially with linear phase filters the filter length is too short. This will result in the fact, that the EQ can't do, what you want him to do. Therefor the Electri-Q will display the true filter which is applied in the linear phase mode.
A similar damage is, that convolution EQs tend to have too short IRs as well, and thus they deliver not exactly the same results as the original. For example the famous replicator (hardware standalone from sintefex) uses too short IRs. Additionally they are not "windowed" very good. You can clearly see the artifacts of cutting the Impulse Response (if you know how they look like). Tritone-Plugs do have the same disease (not to mention, that some IRs got in the wrong order).

Furthermore you should definitely try to compare apples and oranges. In the above example the magnitude of all the filters used were different. If you try focus on the time structure (transient behaviour) you have to be sure, that you don't judge the magnitude (which is more likely to happen).
If one would make a plot [Original Filter shootout example] compared to the 4 EQs, you can clearly see some interesting facts. The sonalksis comes closer to the original frequency response, while the "Q" does not. If you've done a good job in the first place (creating the original) the sonalksis will sound better, because it comes closer to the original.

The 'Mystery' sample comes closest. And finally the 'Mystery 2' sample enhances the highs, which others don't. So in detail you are comparing apples with oranges (although they all are EQs of course). On the other hand one might say: "I always only tweaked the bass knob..."

Just some thoughts,

Christian

P.S.: If you make an A|B|X compare of a good matched pair of different EQs (in the sense of magnitude), you should hardly hear any difference. If I once have time for this, I will do a special EQ A|B|X program to test your hearing skills.

[martian]

bmanic,

unfortunately i find your test flawed. if you equal the freq response from some of those eq settings then you will prob find the phase is almost identical. btw im ignoring sonalksis dither.

i think what you are hearing is not inferioir/superioir sound but simply different settings. smaller bandwidth firstly means you require more gain to equal the apparent level of settings with higher bandwidth. it also mean more phase shift, so particularly in the low end the notes will ring more, subjectively you loose the 'tightness'.

as christian points out with the sonalksis vs Q. Q as i ve mentioned before deflats to a very small bandwidth and will always sound inferoir in the same way any digital can be made to.

get christians analyser match up some settings then compare. just my thoughts.

ps. i think mystery eqs may be hydratone and sintefex.

[Christian Budde]

ps. i think mystery eqs may be hydratone and sintefex.

I thought about that as well, but I'm not quite sure. It's definitely not hydratone/valvetone I've checked that. But the IRs are quite similar.

For "Mystery 2" I can say, that it uses an impulse response of about 400 samples, which may be done with sintefex...

Anyway, for those of you who like to do their own tests, feel free to download the "deconvolve" tool, I created: http://www.aixcoustic.com/uploads/media/Deconvolve.zip
It's just a zip with the exe, no installer, no manual, just the program.

You can use it for deconvolving other material as well, but was build for the above sound examples only. Under menu, you also have the possibility to apply a "window" to filter out only 2048 samples. This way you can smooth the magnitude.

For "Mystery 1" I determined an IR-length of about 420 samples. Might be sintefex as well.

Best regards,

Christian

[defjamm]

hey guys i have some questions regarding the results of hydratone and some observations.
first the harmonic distortion of this plug-in is pretty high, maybe one reason why a lot of people seem to like it. but something different is/was shocking to me in some way.
when i select the ff 110 device @ 1370hz and apply -12db gain...the vst plugin analyser shows me in reality there are only -5db...i remember the hype about hydratone( i was part of it) and that it is neutral compared to other software-eqs...now when i look at this i understand why lol. other software-eqs take 12db away and that will sound more affected than the fake 5db of hydratone.
my question now, is this a problem with hydratone or would the analog eq, from which the irs were taken, behave the same way?

[martian]

i think its both, i assume the wiggly low freq response is the short IR but the general numerical inaccuracy comes from the analog relm? you always hear people refering to analog eq X being so powerful, 1db here and it blows away any plugin. i think it has to do with electronics getting inaccurate/non linear in the lows particularly. but i know nothing here, christian enlighten us.

hydratone has been a bit of a sonic red herring for me, as well as an unstable hog for a year and now a fix that doesnt work on my comp. so ive totally annihilated it from my workflow since i was able to test it properly a few weeks back.

[Frippertronix]

Amongst phase warping EQ's I prefer minimum phase. Too much phase warping makes things sound unnatural as you boost or cut more and more.

I think the concept behind "coloring" EQ's is that the coloration they provide stands out as you boost regions more and more, which can compliment certain instruments or mixes in some cases. A number of EQ's is a good idea to have on hand, since they interact so differently based on the material.

[Frippertronix]

Generally, the more money one spends on 'eq' ,be it in making music or listening to it, the more 'level 42' one becomes.

Ouch!

If they buy the most expensive EQ ever made, do they become "Kenny G"?