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#1
09-30-1999
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I just got a set of Event 20/20P's and I have always heard that you should monitor with a flat EQ but it sounds ten times better with a bit of high end added and a chunk of low end added.
If i play my favorite CD through my monitors and add a touch of EQ untill it sounds good, can't I mix my own stuff while keeping these same EQ settings? Would't the key be in not changing the EQ settings once you found a sound you liked? When I try to monitor flat... I can't hear cymbals or subwoofer stuff very clearly... Is a little boost really that bad??? 
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#2
09-30-1999
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Do you mean you can't hear it on your own stuff or on commercial CDs? If the former...I hope you know what that means. If the latter...perhaps you've been turning it up to 11 a bit too much.
I refer you to the main site. The purpose of good mixing monitors is not for them to sound good or to make your music sound good. It's so you can hear what your music really sounds like, so you can make it sound good!
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#3
10-01-1999
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Hey Ed,
I think that you might be onto something with the high frequency hearing loss theory... However... the genetic bugs you speak of were planted (I was born in Arkansas) way before my "fall from grace"... I've been playing live shows for 8 years now without wearing hearing protection... (You try singing with earplugs in...) I can't play with any kind of conviction wearing earplugs... I knew the risks... I don't understand how I'm getting my signal out of phase since I'm not inserting any devices into the signalpath... I'm just adding a touch of EQ through the parametrics built in to my mixer... The signal has to go through the EQ's whether they are flat or not... The monster cables are a good idea also... They made a huge difference in the sound quality of my home stereo... Maybe my mixer has something to do with it... It's a $350 Alesis... Maybe it has cheap connections that are squashing the signal... I don't know... All I know is that with the parametric EQ's set flat... I have a hard time hearing what is going on in cymbal land... I'm finishing up a new piece that will be mixed through my new Events... I will post it and you can judge for yourself if I'm placing the highs and lows correctly... Although the MP3 format effects those things...
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#4
10-01-1999
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I hate to say this, S8-N, but if it's cymbals you're having trouble hearing, you should visit your local audiologist pronto. You might not get your hearing back but you might realize how much you've lost, and you can learn how to prevent it from happening in the future. And in such a case, you might indeed have to boost your EQ permanently, but the tests will show you exactly how much and in what bands so the end result will sound flat to you. Good luck, my friend...and please take this seriously, it's serious.
URLs: http://www.hearnet.com/text/mainframe.html http://www.betterhearing.org/index.htm http://www.asha.org/consumers/brochures/noise.htm http://www.searchwave.com/search/searchwave.cgi BTW -- after being in a band where I had to stand near the cymbals -- I got a set of custom-made earplugs (yes, they poured some kinda goop in my ears to make the mold). They cut down the sound level like crazy, but, thanks to a special channel, you don't have that pressure buildup in your head that makes it feel like you have earplugs in, and it doesn't totally wipe out the high frequencies, just the edginess thereof. I can hang out right in front of giant speaker cabs and not have any problems whatever, and nobody can see them so I don't feel like I have a wooden leg or something (another advantage of being a longhair :-) These things only cost about $40, BTW. [This message has been edited by Dragon (edited 10-01-1999).]
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#5
10-02-1999
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This is a serious issue; especially to the younger folk that might tune in to this thread. I know the music sounds better LOUD. I know your band sounds better LOUD, but keep in mind the damage you are doing to your ears!
I remember back in Jr. High school, I used to hang with a bunch of cool musician types. We went to see a show one night, and the coolest of the cool, the Fonzi of the crowd, if you will, wore earplugs. After that he was considered a nerd. Why? For protecting his hearing. YES> At the time it was uncool to give a sh*t about your future, but c'mon, that is just plain stupidity, looking back with some remorse, of the whole "macho" image of rock & roll really is contradicting. I guess my point is this: Don't you want to hear the wonderful things that you've created? Or would you rather be happy just wondering what everyone else hears (because you can't)? P.S. This is not directed towards you, S8-N, or anyone else, I just thought Dragon brought up a really good point that ought to be explored. [This message has been edited by Brad (edited 10-02-1999).]
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#6
10-02-1999
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O.K. ED...
You should have been a cop... you ask a lot of questions... I have to make it quick... My girl thinks I have some sort of twisted internet sex-thing going on... I tell her that I am participating in an internet discussion group about home recording and she thinks I am full of shit... My signal path is very simple... Mic's into my mixer, adjust the trim to get the right level... into my sound card... into Cool Edit Pro... Mixdown is done internally... I get the levels right and click "mixdown". The mixdown is a WAV. file and I can burn Disks from that WAV. Once the signal is on hard drive... it stays there... All of my processing is done within Cool Edit Pro... I have no outboard gear... The path from CEP runs back through my soundcard into a stereo channel on my mixer to the monitor out jacks(which go through the EQ's) I am using a collection of bastard orphan cables that appeared in my footlocker after numerous relocations... I can explain it in more detail when I am sober... but it doesn't get much simpler than that... I'm gonna take a picture of my setup and then maybe you'll understand... There aren't a whole lot of options as far as signal paths go... I don't know where I could have gone wrong... All I know is that when people come over and I have the stereo cranked... They don't say..." Jeez... that's way too much high end..." If I am compensating... then it seems to agree with ears other than mine... Then again we all have been to too many shows... I do actually take ear plugs when I go to see a band live... I usually listen for awhile then when it starts to get old and loud... put in the plugs... I recently made the mistake of leaving my earplugs at home for the loudest show of the decade...(SLAYER at the House of Blues in New Orleans) I went to see two of my favorite bands ( System of a Down & HED(pe)), which were opening... They had arena volume shit going on in a medium size club... I guess when you get that old you have to shake things up... UH... i got off of the track... I need to go to bed now... The only outboard gear I have is a mixer and monitors... Not many options... Good night- S8-N
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#7
10-02-1999
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By the way I argee totally with Brad... Take earplugs to shows... you never know when the sound man will suck and crank those teeth shattering high-mids...
I make it a point to take ear plugs to shows... nothing sucks more than burning out your ears on a couple of shitty bands that you didn't want to see in the first place and ruining your perception of a band that you have been wanting to see for years... I just can't wear 'em on stage...
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#8
10-02-1999
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Here is my story:
Before I really got into recording I mixed live shows. I worked with one band most of the time, but would mix other bands upon request. I eventually spent more time in the studio than I did mixing concerts. Some bands stage volume was so loud I had to really crank the PA up so that I could get a good mix. The day after a show where I had to do this very thing, I had session to do. It was terrible for me that day; I could rotate the highs of a channel's eq and could not tell any difference in the signal one way or another. It was at that point that I decided that I would give up on mixing live shows and limit myself to studio production only.
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#11
09-02-2001
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Damn...
Talk about diggin' in the crates!
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#13
10-18-2001
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war support
earplugs at an indoor slayer show aren't dorky-they're self-protection! i always bring plugs to heavy indoor shows. i also don't crank my own stuff up anywhere in the ear-damaging range, because i enjoy it just fine at the kinda-tough-to-talk range. note that i said talk, not yell. at the last slayer show i saw, you could scream in one anothers' ear and still not hear it. glad i had plugs.
__________________
the eyes are not here|there are no eyes here|in this valley of dying stars|in this hollow valley|this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
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#14
10-19-2001
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Another point is that (for reasons I don't fully understand) BAD sound usually sounds better at higher SPL's.
The worse the sound system, the more you want to turn it up. The more you turn it up, the more it distorts. So you turn it up even more to make it sound, uh... better.  It's a cruel loop. If you've ever heard really hi-fidelity sound reinforcement, it's a beautiful thing. Notes cut through the crowd with space and clarity even at relatively low SPL's. High quality sound can definitely help save your hearing. barefoot
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#15
10-25-2001
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A real-world example of what Barefoot is saying: two shows I saw this summer, the Alan Parsons Walk Down Abby Road, and the reunion tour of Roxy Music. Both had absolutely flawless sound, best I'd ever heard. So good that they were the only shows in years I took my earplugs out - they were loud, but not typical rock concert loud, and every sound was crystel clear.
Also I figured out a trick so I am never caught without earplugs. This may sound silly, but I swear this works great if you forget to bring a pair: 1. Go into the john and take a single square of toilet paper (two-ply prefered) 2. Fold it in half, then half again, then half again two more times into a strip (like rolling a joint) 3. Tear in half (one for each ear) 4. The fold each piece up in thirds. When done you have a piece about a half inch long. You want to put it in your ear folded side in, torn side out (so no little bits get left inside) and do NOT stick it in too far. It works surprisingly well, although if you are sensitive about weird looks you might want to wait until the house lights go down. I used to have a pair of Sonic Filters, nice rubber earplugs with a metal "channel" which supposedly cut volumne without muteing sound. I found that they didn't work any better than toilet paper.
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#16
10-26-2001
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POSTED BY SONUSMAN
Quote:
BRAVO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Audioquest, Straightwire, Kimber Kable, MIT, also worth considering.
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#17
10-26-2001
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Here we go again.
 If you're talking microphones, that source very low currents and voltages which will subsequently be amplified by dozens of dB's, I'm certainly open to arguments that cables make a difference. But if your talking speaker cable, NO. There is absolutely no evidence that normal lengths and gauges of speaker wire cause any audible effect. You often hear arguments from the audio mythology crowd about esoteric signal qualities like "microdynamics". Bulllshit. The resistance, capacitance, inductance, skin effect, phase, ect. of 10 ft (2m) of 12 gauge copper speaker cable alters the signal (both dynamically and overall level) on the order of 0.02dB. This means there is a 0.02dB difference between using speaker wire and directly attaching your speakers to the amplifier. 0.02dB is more than a factor of 10 smaller than the absolute minimum difference threshold of audibility of 0.25dB. Now if you want to compare the difference between two cables of the same length and gauge, regardless of the design, your looking at effects on the order of 0.0002dB. Speaker parameters are very dependent on temperature and pressure. Simply changing you thermostat by a degree or two Fahrenheit, or a low pressure zone moving into your area will cause responses changes orders of magnitude greater than this. People always hate to hear this, because they think it makes them look foolish, but the biggest effect of wires on audio is the Placebo effect. The placebo effect is nothing to be scoffed at or ashamed of. It's very real and very powerful. Often in clinical studies of medicines the placebo effect is actually larger than the effect of drugs which are subsequently deemed as "very effective". This is why we always need to look at the numbers. Mathematics and test instruments aren't influenced by suggestion like the frail whims of human perception. Try psyching yourself into believing that painting you zip cord with green magic marker will dramatically "open up the sound". Magic markers are a lot cheaper then MIT, or Kimber Kable. barefoot
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#18
10-26-2001
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Quote:
You often come up with some very decent theory and design principles, but then you manage to counteract it with posts like this, which only proves one thing.......Theory is just theory, until its proven in practise. Until then, its worthless. Your statements above are absolutely, catagorically not true. There is not just a, but a huge difference. Just a couple of examples: For feeding a full-range signal to a speaker system: different frequencies travel through wiring at marginally different speeds. The lower quality the cable, the longer the cable, the more this effect will occur. Simple fact. A good example. Our 5 way crossover large concert (20.000 people plus) rigs had racks of amps for each frequency section. Each frequency section had its own gauge cable, the lowest frequency section cabling being 4 x the gauge of the high end. Positioning of the amp racks was determined by the positioning of the subs, as the cabling feeding the subs had to be as short as possible. In cases where acoustics determined the need for flown subs (often needed to function as a bass trap), we needed to fly amp racks with them, to keep cable lengths short. NOT doing the above would mean different frequencies arrive at the drivers at different times = bad sound. Very often in live systems this effect is counteracted by putting different frequency bands out-of-phase, which is by far from the right solution. Please don't think we hauled 6 wheeled metal-and-canvas dollys with extremely heavy cables around for a placebo effect....... Later we increased overall sound quality and 'tightness" of the sound even further by direct coupling the amps to the low-end drivers, which, by the way, increased efficiency by over 22%. From the latter, just conclude that efficiency was increased by 22% simply by NOT using cable - could that possibly mean that cable might make a difference? Here, I have just replaced all the S/PDIF cables with new ones that have a retail value of $109.95 each, after choosing them from a blind test of 4 possibilites, tests with different sounds, 4 different cables, in different sequences. I identified this particular cable each time, and with great ease, because the sound quality was so much superior. That was digital, in the analogue domain the quality difference is even larger. Take for instance the three top brands, Mogami, Monster and Zaolla, play the same line level through them and listen. You will find that only one out of these three displays a truely linear frequency response. Cable data is normally provided in terms of resistance, inductance and capacity, measured over a certain measurement unit, from 20 to 20k. Equally, or more importand figures are hardly ever given, essential data such as the standing wave reflection and linearity. The reason these figures are not readily provided is simple, they are lousy but in the best cables available. In the end barefoot, there is only one measurement. I suggest that one day you go into a real accurate listening environment, hook some cables up and listen to the characteristics of each one.
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#19
10-26-2001
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Quote:
 I said: "There is absolutely no evidence that normal lengths and gauges of speaker wire cause any audible effect." I wasn't talking about huge 20kW sound reinforcement systems or digital transmission lines. These are very different stories in respective power and bandwidth than a regular old 10 ft speaker cable for monitoring. In these cases, all you need to do is crunch the numbers once again, and you find that wires in fact DO make a difference. barefoot
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#20
10-26-2001
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I just gave some very clear examples, in the case of the PA sytem, (20kW?? that was less than the monitors
 ) a, you could say amplified example.But EXACTLY the same goes for full range systems, large or small. Take a low quality cable and you will have an entirely different sound / characteristic compared to a high quality cable. Regardless if its mic, line, digital or speaker. Come on! This is NOT something anyone would argue against, its a common FACT
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#21
10-26-2001
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Maybe I should give up audio then, because for line level and speaker cables of normal length I just don't hear it. (Just had my hearing checked 6 months ago and I fall into the top 10% for dynamic range and frequency). All my calculations and instruments tell me the same thing too.
On top of that, it just doesn't make sense. You put a signal into an amplifier having meters of traces, hundreds of solder joints, scores of resistors, scores of capacitors, scores of semiconductors - a mind boggling labyrinth of electrical twists and turns - then ask whether a 1% or 2% difference between two short stretches of extra wire whose electrical properties are already orders of magnitude smaller than the output specs of the amp or the input specs of the speakers makes a difference? Man, you really need to show me some compelling evidence to make me believe that. Now put me in the crappiest room you want and double blind me test me using similar speakers having polypropylene, kevlar, and carbon fiber midbass cones, and I guaranty I'll identify them nearly 100% of the time. barefoot
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#22
10-26-2001
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Listening depends on how well your ears are trained TO hear.
Differences are more audible in an accurate listening environment. Calculations and instruments? The results depend on what tests you run. As I said previously, resistance, inductance and capacity are easely measured, but of equal (or more) importance is linearity and SWR, this are not so easy to measure. Have you ever listened to a good system and then, for instance, swapped the speaker cables for a set of monster cable?
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#24
10-27-2001
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Only a fool would add eq to thier monitors, You need to treat the room.
__________________
 wayne
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#25
10-27-2001
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listening environment is the first priority.
darrin is right, apart from in the case of main monitoring systems in large studios, which should as norm be re-calibrated once per year, normally when the speakers are re-coned. This involves a fine-balancing by means of electronics, not EQ'ing
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