You can write an entire book discussing analog and digital EQ. Graphic v. Parametric....linear v. minimal....etc.

To simplify everything, for basic music listening and enjoyment, a basic digital Parametric EQ will be over-kill.

The biggest drawback of any EQ is not knowing how to properly use it. 

If you have any specific questions or concerns, please ask and I shall try to help as best as I can.

Quote from: LFF on June 22, 2012, 06:42:44 PM

You can write an entire book discussing analog and digital EQ. Graphic v. Parametric....linear v. minimal....etc.

To simplify everything, for basic music listening and enjoyment, a basic digital Parametric EQ will be over-kill.

The biggest drawback of any EQ is not knowing how to properly use it. 

If you have any specific questions or concerns, please ask and I shall try to help as best as I can.

How I've been using equalizers is typically trying to find the frequency response, matching it to a curve that represents what type of headphones I typically like, then just continuing to make little changes to try and make it sound as best as possible to my ears. It seems like the next step would be to try and almost null out the thin band of frequencies that are known to resonate with the headphones or that I suspect having ringing at to try and tame the ringing, but I haven't really experimented with this much. Is that proper or improper usage of an EQ?

Thinking back in retrospect, when I knew much less about headphones, I just tried to reduce sibilance by applying a thin -15dB EQ to frequencies in the range of 6khz to 8khz until I found a spot where it worked. I wonder if I was unknowingly trying to tame treble peaks.

WOW....-15db is a LOT!

Sure, you can use EQ to change the way a headphone sounds but it's not the way I use it. I use it to restore or master the actual source aka the music.

Purrin and a lot of other members use EQ to tame certain frequencies. However, I know that Purrin uses a parametric to surgically tame only a few frequencies and he uses a wide "Q".

I would recommend that if you're EQ'ing your headphones to get a particular sound, you use 3-4 wide notches and do a general curve instead of pin-pointing every single bump/dip. Try to remove rather than add.

Quote from: LFF on June 22, 2012, 07:17:44 PM

Quote from: SanjiWatsuki on June 22, 2012, 07:07:07 PM

Quote from: LFF on June 22, 2012, 06:42:44 PM

You can write an entire book discussing analog and digital EQ. Graphic v. Parametric....linear v. minimal....etc.

To simplify everything, for basic music listening and enjoyment, a basic digital Parametric EQ will be over-kill.

The biggest drawback of any EQ is not knowing how to properly use it. 

If you have any specific questions or concerns, please ask and I shall try to help as best as I can.

How I've been using equalizers is typically trying to find the frequency response, matching it to a curve that represents what type of headphones I typically like, then just continuing to make little changes to try and make it sound as best as possible to my ears. It seems like the next step would be to try and almost null out the thin band of frequencies that are known to resonate with the headphones or that I suspect having ringing at to try and tame the ringing, but I haven't really experimented with this much. Is that proper or improper usage of an EQ?

Thinking back in retrospect, when I knew much less about headphones, I just tried to reduce sibilance by applying a thin -15dB EQ to frequencies in the range of 6khz to 8khz until I found a spot where it worked. I wonder if I was unknowingly trying to tame treble peaks.

WOW....-15db is a LOT!

Sure, you can use EQ to change the way a headphone sounds but it's not the way I use it. I use it to restore or master the actual source aka the music.

Purrin and a lot of other members use EQ to tame certain frequencies. However, I know that Purrin uses a parametric to surgically tame only a few frequencies and he uses a wide "Q".

I would recommend that if you're EQ'ing your headphones to get a particular sound, you use 3-4 wide notches and do a general curve instead of pin-pointing every single bump/dip. Try to remove rather than add.

It was a super thin high-Q curve that I was using to try and just nail the sibilance and only the sibilance. I think I had limited success. That divot I didn't really hear too much, but I was able to kill the sibilance a bit. It was a small success as an experiment, I thought.

My general method is to match the curve then use a global gain to all frequencies to make it so that everything is equalized down. That way it can be easy for me to edit as well as not adding anything to avoid any clipping.

I would try using something like Easy-Q.

I'd have to sit over your shoulder and see what your process is to see what you are doing right/wrong.

-15db is quite a lot to use. The only time I use such a huge change is to com pletely mask a certain frequency. You should generally not be going more than +/- 6db.

I am likely misunderstanding your question but I will try to answer still.

If you mean a perfect digital filter in the sense you can make whatever filter shape (such as a high Q parametric filter) and get no phase shift, no additional ringing in the time domain, then I can answer that, no, there is no perfect digital filter. Digital filters are potentially just as bad as analog ones and suffer from additional artifacts due to sampling. In other words, a high Q (razor sharp) filter will ring like mad in the time domain and have very sharp phase shift.

Now, if you've seen the recent posts in the csd thread over at HF, you'll see a nice illustration on high such filter combined to a headphone lead to a smoother response with eliminated ringing. That would point to the fact that the impulse response of the headphone + filter is indeed cleaner (less ringing). So, I get just as confused as you are then... The filter itself adds ringing and what not, yet once convolved with the imperfect headphone, the combined response is cleaner. I somehow viewed filters as compromising (probably more from the analog days when the signal was physically going through inductors and other capacitors), no matter the benefits, but maybe indeed the magic is in using them with parcimony...