[Audio Empire]

On Wed, 7 Sep 2011 18:39:11 -0700, MIKE--- wrote
(in article ):

I have a Rane 1/3 octave equalizer and a Rane spectrum analyzer. I
tried eq-ing the room by setting the equalizer for a flat response at
the listening position. It sounded awful! Now I have the equalizer
adjusted by ear and it sounds good. Maybe this is because my speakers
(DBX Soundfield Ones) bounce a lot of sound off the walls.


That can happen. I had a friend (now deceased) who paid a lot of money (in
the 1970's) for a Crown 1/3-octave equalizer and a tech with a spectrum
analyzer to come in and EQ his system in his listening room. He had a pair of
Altec Lansing 15-inch woofers mounted in bass-reflex cabinets designed by
Altec (but built by a local cabinet-maker) and topped with an Altec 500 Hz
treble horn. The system started out sounding lousy (the Altec trebel horn was
always a terrible transducer in my estimation) and after the EQ, it sounded
even worse. I think the reason was because EQ couldn't overcome some of the
Altec system's basic flaws, not all of which could be EQ-ed out. That might
be your problem, I don't know.

For my own part, I now run a new HK 990 Integrated amp. (dual mono design,
150 Watts/channel, built-in room correction software, built-in dual
differential 24/192 DACs, built-in phono preamps, built-in ADC (for digital
recording from analog sources), etc). I have used the EQ setup for my room
and with my Martin Logan electrostatics with subwoofers, the EQ scheme
smoothed out the transition from the Martin-Logans to the subs in such a way
that they are now seamless (can't tell where the crossover point is and I
can't hear the subs as a separate entity. Turn 'em off, and the low bass
simply goes away. The character of the bass doesn't change at all!). I find
that the EQ seems to do very little (you can defeat the effect and bypass the
EQ with a flick of the remote control) with the response of the system
otherwise. Yeah, you can hear a difference on a direct A/B, but it's not
profound. I keep it in the system because the EQ Software did what I was
never able to accomplish by ear **getting my subwoofers to integrate properly
with the main speaker system.