the thing is that most headphones have their own sound signature, but why is eq’ing not used as much to give your desired sound signature to your headphones or whatever? there has to be a downside right?
Purist thought process is that the recording artist does not want you to mess with the sound. IMO pure drivel…but that’s what personal preference is all about. The same thought process would apply to changing pads and sure as heck using tube amplification, both of which apply some sort of change to the music.
Then there is the thought process that less in the signal chain is better, and it can be. I use analogue EQ and enjoy it. I don’t apply it to all songs or genres, it’s all a personal preference thing. I am capable of hearing what my signal path sounds like or doesn’t and if I choose to add more equipment to it, it’s again my choice. The higher up the $$$$ ladder you go the more heated the discussion. Seriously until you have over $50K invested in your gear don’t worry about it. Use EQ to help your headphones sound best for you. Enjoy the music.
Even then you still don’t have to worry about it lol
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It’s just too much into the ‘weeds’ for me and begins to feel too obsessive. Like it turns into instead of just enjoying a song… I’ll start obsessing whether it could use more low-end… or if 2k could use a little bit of smoothing… etc.
It’s like yeah, no… just give me a headphone with good tuning then let me forget about it. It’s ‘too much’ control for me personally.
I mean otherwise It’s just a preference thing… do whatever you want.
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I really don’t eq at all personally, but it’s a preference, and I’m not going to discourage or look differently at someone who eq’s at all, if you can use eq to get closer to your preference, by all mean go ahead. But I typically don’t agree with statements like “this headphone needs eq” or something like “why buy this headphone if you can just eq your current one” etc
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I mostly use EQs to fix nasty peaks, or cut out humm from voice chats 
One downside is that it pits you against an old-school tradition among audio enthusiasts that EQ degrades the purity of the sound signal. We all know the importance of purity, right? This degradation idea goes back to the early days of EQ before EQ tool creators knew what they were doing.
Another downside is that the headphone hobby is largely about gear acquisition. And a major excuse for more gear is the search for the perfect tuning. If you can modify a headphone’s tuning via EQ, that’s one less tool in the excuse-to-purchase toolkit.
A more practical downside is that EQ tools are rarely portable, plus a sophisticated software tool like EQAPO is non-trivial to set-up and to learn.
It’s kinda irritating lol about the whole purity aspect. EQ is used to produce the music you listen to lol, there’s nothing wrong with making it how you like
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Listen not to satanic forces that would corrupt the purity of our bodily fluids and tympanic membranes. You have been warned.
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I think EQ is great and ive used it on a number of headphones. if you have a frequency graph you can use it as a guide to EQ the harsher things in a headphone down and increase the things it may be lacking. But Software EQ dont always work on everything. And im surprised how few EQ products there are out there.
like 2% of dacs and amps have a EQ on it. i just dont get it. The smaller dedicated EQ’s products have very little control. the more EQ the better. I was looking at a 31 band equalizer for 140$ but where am i gonna put this thing? can you imagine my sp200 and SU8 stack on top of this monstrosity?
Minidsp is a great product, but they like have a monopoly lol. nobody has anything like it. The Minidps is lacking good frequency, but the minidps HD has 192. but its 200$. and i’d have to use it for my DAC. replace my SU8. This whole situations just sucks. if someone comes out with a good option im gonna buy it up so fast
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I don’t EQ simply because I know I’d never be able to leave it alone, it’s the same reason I stopped creating Reshade presets for games. There’s always one more little thing that’s not quite right.
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Smart man lol, one can easily get caught up tweaking endlessly lol
Get a small rack (like 3 U) and a shelf for it, then put all units into it.
(Of course my previous post was tongue-in-cheek, playing off a gag in an old-timey movie.)
Personally, I use EQ in pursuit of two goals that are non-mainstream. For one thing I have some hearing damage in one ear that makes me need to reduce one narrow band in the upper mids and increase the two bands on either side of it. The other thing is that I listen to large ensemble classical music. Certain passages of dense harmonies sound truly ugly unless the headphone’s tuning is absolutely neutral.
For general use the best EQ may well be the one that’s done automatically in your brain, called psychoacoustic accommodation. But so far as I can tell brains can only do so much, so it’s those headphones with tuning issues that brains can’t touch that drive people nuts. In that case, EQ might be a good option, as Mazeframe points out.
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is it true an EQ degrades the signal?
Technically yes realistically no unless you have a horrible eq
Depends how it is done.
The simplest EQ has a frequency splitter that then drives an OpAmp
(The resistors with the arrows pointing at are the knobs/sliders on the front of an EQ)
Alternatively you could have filters for each frequency range you want to change and then modulate the power the OpAmp puts on.
this ↑
Just like any device and connection in the signal path, it degrades ever so slightly.
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I have some nice ass hardware eq’s, and while they change the sound I don’t think they degrade the signal
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Bob Katz, a successful mastering engineer who’s written a textbook on the subject, obsesses over things like bit depth in his audio chain yet uses EQ to tweak his LCD-4 and Stax 007.
Even though I am in that field, I stay away from those types of forums and stuff like that, because it’s just always an argument and noone is ever right lol. It’s a real no fun zone over there lol