Casual Listening As flat as possible?

[KingstonRock]

Has anyone else since getting into recording found themselves disabling eqs and enhancers when they listen to music casually? At first it was because I felt bad screwing up professional mixes by adding bass and treble, but after a month of forcing myself to listen flat, I've found that everything sounds better without eq. Anyone else feel this way?

Eric

 

[Blue Bear Sound]

My stereo is set flat... unless it's a bad recording, I haven't touched a tone control in ages....

 

[Sennheiser]

I've experimented with some commercial stuff run through my mixer. I listen to it once through and then play it back and start playing with the EQ knobs.

All of the knobs invariably are returned to their neutral positions by about the fifth time I play something back.

Now I listen to anything commercial in the neutral positions.

 

[ambi]

yea

yea ive found myself listening to everything flat. With the exception of having the bass in my car turned up to 3. I don't have subs, but it makes the 6' in my door have a nice thud. But yea i've totaly found that. Flat is good.

 

[Wil Davis]

...snip
I've found that everything sounds better without eq. Anyone else feel this way?

Eric

I've been listening that way for the past forty years - relieved to find I'm not the only "weirdo"...

- Wil

 

[Track Rat]

Absolutely. Once you learn how to "listen", it's damn near impossible to do it any other way. I hopped in a car with a friend of mine and he pops a CD into his car stereo and and I almost jumped out of his moving vehical. I looked down at his graphic EQ and it had the big "smiley face" dialed in. God, that hyped high end sounds like fingernails on a chalk board to me now.

 

[regebro]

If you wonder who has been fiddling with your stereo settings after you have had a party, it's me. I just casn't help it. I go up the the stereo and fiddle with all the sound controls I can, until I get as flat a sound I can. Then I turn the bass up a notch or two for the party people.

Most people seem to have their controls more or less randomly.

 

[Sangram]

At home: Always flat. For the last ten years. I used the smiley face for a while but after starting off on rock and blues have decided on flat EQs. My new system is actually a little weak in the low mids, so I have to add a bit at 250 and 500 Hz for a well-rounded sound. Glum face type. I think this is to counter the automatic 'contour' added by most home stereos.

In the car: I need a bit of bass boost because my speakers are a little crappy. Everything else is flat. The booster pushes up the treble a bit. At high volumes, I switch the booster off. It actually works like a contour control, so I get a bit of treble, but it's needed for the sound.

 

[Alchemist3k]

I don't know much about mixing but I am going to break with the majority and say no. I always listen with the EQ... always. Why? Because 99% of normal people do, so why mix towards a small proportion of people who listen flat?

By logic it seems to me that, in thoery, if you expect people to listen flat so you hike up the bass in the mix. Joe Public pops it into his Alpine car stereo and what do you know, distorted bass.

It depends on what you mean by 'flat'? 'Flat' on a high end Denon home stereo sound great because the high quality speakers have a very wide and flattering frequency response. However, 'flat' on a standard home stereo, or even worst a small radio or boom box, will sound dire because these systems typically have speakers that cannot accurately or easily produce bass frequencies. The sound is often over-broght at best or at worst just plain 'tinny'.

 

[esactun]

'Flat' on a high end Denon home stereo sound great because the high quality speakers have a very wide and flattering frequency response. However, 'flat' on a standard home stereo, or even worst a small radio or boom box, will sound dire because these systems typically have speakers that cannot accurately or easily produce bass frequencies. The sound is often over-broght at best or at worst just plain 'tinny'.

Yeah, I have an Aiwa crapbox thing that isn't flat no matter what you do to it. Of course the EQ is merely three preset contours. "Q Sound" is some sort of weird fake surround thing that sucks (except on select bad recordings). Soon I'll need to buy something else!

Flat sounds better in my car. I add a little bass to it as some folks mentioned.

I wonder if the smiley EQ was invented when most people had those crappy speakers that had the super-harsh midrange/hi midrange? That's why I used to use it like that, cuz "flat" on those speakers was painfully fatiguing. "Smiley" actually made such speaker sound better. Yet it can only hurt on better speakers.

 

[jgourd]

I tend to do casual listening on my studio monitors. Preamp set flat into very clean poweramp. Studio monitors are not flat however so I had to hook up an RTA/Digital EQ between the preamp and poweramp.

Using a calibration mic I got pink noise from my monitors to measure flat by tweaking the EQ and smoothing out the curves.

My next project is to drag the RTA to a couple of very nice listening rooms and see what the EQ curve is like there. When I am done I will be able to call up different rooms on the EQ to approximate how something might sound on those systems without having to burn a CD and actually play it on those systems.

 

[Alchemist3k]

Technically interesting and perhaps a lot of effort. Good idea however.

 

[jgourd]

The digital EQ makes it trivial to do this stuff. You can call up a response curve with three pushes of the buttons on the front.

 

[regebro]

If you listen to music with a smiley-setting, you'll then try to mix it so it sound like that, when you mix on your non-smiley monitor system. Result, you'll get *two* smiley effects, one from your mixing, the second from the listeners stereo. Result: It will sound like shit.

So, you need to listen to music as you mix it.


So how should you mix it? Flat or with a smiley? Well, you should do your mixing flat, for one simple reason: Not everybody listens with a smile face, and a lot of music gets played on small crappy mono radios at work, and so on. If you mix your music with a monitor system set like a smiley, you will have no idea how it will sound otherwise.

Make your monitoring as flat an accurate as possible, and it is more likely that:
1. You will hear the problems with your mix.
2. That the mix will sound good on any system.

 

[Lt. Bob]

However, 'flat' on a standard home stereo, or even worst a small radio or boom box, will sound dire because these systems typically have speakers that cannot accurately or easily produce bass frequencies. The sound is often over-broght at best or at worst just plain 'tinny'.

That's because "flat" on one of those type systems is just a mark on the knob. Just because a knob has a center detent marked "flat" doesn't mean it is. If you check out high-end audiophile systems (and I'm talking about stuff a lot better and more expensive than Denon) you'll find that quite a few doen't even have tone controls. That's because tone controls introduce other problems such as phase shifts in certain freqs and some others which I'm drawing a blank on right now.
If your reference system is right.....then flat is the way to go 'cause it should be as close as possible to the original recording. Then if you hear problems like a boomy bass for instance, you know it occurred further up the chain and not in your playback system.

 

[Wil Davis]

...snip
you'll find that quite a few doen't even have tone controls. That's because tone controls introduce other problems such as phase shifts in certain freqs and some others which I'm drawing a blank on right now.
snip...

One of my systems is a Quad* 44 pre with Quad 405 power amp. Quad's philosophy always used to be something like:
"...minimum knob-age, and controls-with-which-to-fiddle, means there's less chance of introducing interference (noise, phase, mechanical failure) in the signal chain..."

(*Acoustical Manufacturing Company Ltd)

 

[KingstonRock]

I was gone for two days and already all of these repllies. Just responding to some stuff that people said about boosting the bass on weak systems. I have found that even on weak systems flat is better, because once you start boosting the bass everything else gets messed up, you loose the guitars and the bass become a single muddy oomph.

Something else kind of on the subject, has anyone ever noticed that the vocals always sound really loud on music videos? They are always much louder than on the cd.

 

[alonso]

I have been listening to music flat for a while and it amazes you how screwed up people set their EQ on their stereos. I guess that you get an awareness of how the music was really supposed to sound. Now everytime I get on somebody's car, either the treble is piercing my eardrums or the bass turns everything into a muddy thump.
I have also noticed the loud voice on videos too, I guess that the philosophy behind it is that since most of the times you only see the singer in the video, then why bother even putting the other band members on the audio??? Seriously, I guess they just want that the most important instrument, in somebody's perspective, just cuts through even more.

 

[ChorazaiM]

Here's a question though : how does one go about getting a "flat" sound? Sure, you can reset your EQ from a smiley face to a straight line, but that isn't necissarily a flat sound if your speakers are bottom heavy (mor mid heavy, or high heavy, etc) to begin with. So what does one have to do in order to get a "true" flat EQ setting that compensates for everything in the signal chain and whatever colouring it may add?

 

[Lt. Bob]

To truly have a flat setting and know that it's flat you have to real-time it. And it's not just the speakers that you can't be sure of.....it's also the tone controls. As I said before..........just because a tone control has a center detent that says "flat" doesn't mean it's actually flat at that setting.