How do you judge an EQ?

[leban]

Just to point that AKG 270 is not an high-end monitor. It is a good quality and popular pair of headphones.

[Christian Budde]

[..]

There's no need to feel attacked! I don't say "don't trust your ears". I say, if you come to judgement (and that's what this thread is about), do not compare apples with oranges.
I once talked with multree at musikmesse about "warmth". The problem here is, that there is a lack of definition. One imagine "warmth" as more bass, other imagine "warmth" as more distortion. So if you'd like to tell another person, that your brand new EQ is "warmer" than others, you probably don't understand each other. Not often the other person adapt the opinion, because he "believe" that the person who told him is telling the truth.

As a developer I come from one side, but I'm also a musician and I have used the tools as well, so I know, what I'm talking about. Try to do double blind tests with EQs matched to each other and then you can see (i mean: hear), what you can hear.

If you do this tests you have to be sure that both EQs are setup as similar as possible. I did the tests with several subjects and all of them "believed" to hear a difference. In fact (at least for software EQs), the bit sequence played was nearly equal, so there was no possibility to hear a change.

Most people don't want to do such a test, because they fear that they might "fail". But there is no "fail", it's a matter of experience. You're doing the same good job afterwards as you did before. Even a better one, because you know, what can be heard and what not.

Thanks for listening,

Christian

P.S.:

Just to point that AKG 270 is not an high-end monitor. It is a good quality and popular pair of headphones.

I havn't assert that, have I?

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

following your thought, you could never compare reverbs or other fx-s. For example compressors.They are always different kinds of vegetables and fruit.

[Christian Budde]

following your thought, you could never compare reverbs or other fx-s. For example compressors.They are always different kinds of vegetables and fruit.

They definitely are!

For Compressors there are a lot of things which can be different. Developers can make even more things worse here. And with reverbs you have millions of things to tweak. At least imagine convolution reverbs.

[martian]

3) transients are destroyed with little corrections sometimes. You don't need to go deeply 12 dB on both to understand one is better. Put 1 dB in wavelab at the frequency you prefer, it is enought for mudding everything (but wavelab eq is not the evil. Just sonalksis works better, and infact it costs more)

if this is the case tell me what you think of my kick drum examples then.

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

Just make this little test by yourself. Put 0.1 dB 10 times with a bad plug.
Today we use lot of plugs in long chains, pay not much attention on the single degradation, but at the end of the chain you have a big mess. The common mistake is here: you take a new plug and you just see what is doing on a known audio file. But in a real application you eq a lot of times the same source. For example you eq a bit, than you compress, you limit, you eq again the same track inside a group channel and so on. If (I say) every plug is destroying 1%, at the end you have lost 10% or even more. This is my opinion

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

following your thought, you could never compare reverbs or other fx-s. For example compressors.They are always different kinds of vegetables and fruit.

They definitely are!

For Compressors there are a lot of things which can be different. Developers can make even more things worse here. And with reverbs you have millions of things to tweak. At least imagine convolution reverbs.

No, they arent'. Otherwise you couldn't justify an expensive fairchild for a production. And it isn't only a matter of taste. You could say: this eq sounds open, this is a bit dull, and this is a personal taste. But if an eq is ringing in a bad way, it can't be a musical tool at all. When I need to destroy my audio I use a sonicdestructor, not a bad eq. The same on reverbs. If a reverb has a good alg (it gels in a good way inside your mix) you could dislike it, but it remains a good tool. Otherwise why paying a lot for an old EMT.

[martian]

Just make this little test by yourself. Put 0.1 dB 10 times with a bad plug.
Today we use lot of plugs in long chains, pay not much attention on the single degradation, but at the end of the chain you have a big mess. The common mistake is here: you take a new plug and you just see what is doing on a known audio file. But in a real application you eq a lot of times the same source. For example you eq a bit, than you compress, you limit, you eq again the same track inside a group channel and so on. If (I say) every plug is destroying 1%, at the end you have lost 10% or even more. This is my opinion

err, i certainly dont eq the same thing over and over?! once, very rarely twice (pre and post some other effect) or not at all usually does the trick. i think by the destrustion you describe you mean the inaudible quantisation error from the plugs finite precision? and this is why you think every plug is destroying 1%? imo its only destroying something if you have used it incorrectly. if something requires eq then you are fixing it! the right type of eq or plugin will determine how well you can fix it, thats the way round i see things. furthermore have you tried puting 10 analog eqs over a track? with their inability to act as a wire i think that would fit a better objective description of destoying the sound.

[Christian Budde]

following your thought, you could never compare reverbs or other fx-s. For example compressors.They are always different kinds of vegetables and fruit.

They definitely are!

Just to be clear here: They definitely are DIFFERENT! It could be misunderstood.

[Spratman]

I think we should backup here a little bit. It's obvious there are some lingual barriers being encountered here. I don't think anyone means to sound aggressive or hurt here and I'd hope we'd not stray too far from the topic of what makes a good eq.

Spratman

[jens]

err, i certainly dont eq the same thing over and over?!

you are missing his point there...

[Zaphod (giancarlo)]

spratman, you are right.
Probably my english could appear as aggressive, but I don't want.
I'm trying only to defend here tritone/sintefex products, based on sampling, because I think they have different qualities and someone could find them useful even if they aren't so accurate like other digital eq/filters.

[Christian Budde]

Just make this little test by yourself. Put 0.1 dB 10 times with a bad plug.

I did! I compared 10 times 1dB against 1 time 0.1dB. with te result I did a double blind test and I figured out that at least I don't hear a difference (you might quote that I don't want to hear a difference, because I used it on my own EQ, which in fact does show a difference if i add 10x 1db minus 1x 10dB).
AFTER that I ploted the results and here they are:

So it's in the range of +-0.2 dB. Literature tells us, that you shouldn't be able to determine such small differences, so i'm right with my perception.

If you do this test on your own, you have to be sure that you remain the bandwidth constant. If you have an EQ such as AirEQ, your parameter mapping isn't linear. This will in fact sound very different than.

Regards,

Christian

[defjamm]

err, i certainly dont eq the same thing over and over?! once, very rarely twice (pre and post some other effect) or not at all usually does the trick. i think by the destrustion you describe you mean the inaudible quantisation error from the plugs finite precision? and this is why you think every plug is destroying 1%? imo its only destroying something if you have used it incorrectly. if something requires eq then you are fixing it! the right type of eq or plugin will determine how well you can fix it, thats the way round i see things. furthermore have you tried puting 10 analog eqs over a track? with their inability to act as a wire i think that would fit a better objective description of destoying the sound.

i absolutely agree, i don't get his argument. everything is degrading to the sound with further processing, analog or digital. what people describe as a destruction of transients could be in fact a way neutral behavior regarding transients and what enhances them could be through actually adding something to the sound, but isn't that degrading?
the example is also not real-life imho. i don't use 10 different eqs on a single source and if you would do that with an analog eq you would also degrade the sound, maybe way more than with a digital eq...chances could be high that people would like the analog chain just because of the heavy degredation.

[defjamm]

Infact big ears mixers have good gear

and a big imagination especially when they look at the tools they use.