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Technical and scientific discussion of amps, cables and other topics.

RE: The idea that the

The reason why people prefer slightly rolled off response is that the studio monitors used have similar response. Most CDs (including classical and probably even some so-called "purist audiophile" recordings) are EQ'd at some point in the "mastering stage". (The correct term for this stage is "pre-mastering" as the actual mastering takes place at the manufacturing plant.) This EQ is needed because the earlier stages of processing produced imbalance results, either due to accidents or because errors were deliberately made to offset errors in the inferior monitoring and room acoustics at the recording venue or mixing stage.

There are some very subtle and complex relationships between equalization and sound stage. After making lots of adjustments on the electronic crossovers of my Focal satellites and sub woofer I still was left with a few peaks due to room modes, at 40 Hz and 127 Hz and a small peak at 781 Hz. After living with these for the past two months I decided yesterday to see what would happen if I took these out with a parametric equalizer. As expected a few recordings that were bass heavy because of peaks at similar frequencies were tonally improved. This was to be expected, but what was much more surprising is that the sound stage improved greatly in depth, as my mind was no longer cuing in on the room resonances of my small listening room and hearing past them to more of the ambiance on the recordings.

To do this EQ I had to use the iZotope parametric equalizer that comes with Soundforge, a pain in the ass process that takes a minute to process each recording to be played. Unfortunately, this software is tied to Soundforge and is not usable as a VST plugin that I can use with my player software such as cPlay.

Do you know of any good parametric equalizers that run as VST plug ins? Are you still recommending the one from aixcoustic.com?

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar


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