EQ'ing monitors.

[JoeAmerica]

Building our first little room. Is it important to tune your monitors post-output using an analyzer? I've seen(heard) situations where what you hear is not what you get on your disk. Any horror stories and resolutions anyone wants to share?

 

[cusebassman]

I *believe* most will tell you to use decent monitors, and treat the room to avoid standing waves and too much reflection. It seems like a much more thorough way of solving any problems than trying to gfix the output of the monitors to compensate for the room.

 

[JoeAmerica]

Right. Those are things we're taking into consideration. Should I be concerned with my other devices in the chain?

Have M-Audio BX8a's and BX5a's, used separately of course.
Output from Sonar 6 via M-Audio Delta 1010 through a Mackie Big Knob to their respective set of monitors.

My game plan was a putting the analyzer post output(and post Big Knob, BX8a's only), running the noise through the speakers only and tweaking the EQ(also post output) so the speakers themselves have a true flat response in the room. The 5's will have to be tweaked separately in the future.

 

[Track Rat]

Personally, I wouldn't EQ the monitors. I don't. As said, treat the room with some bass traps and such and learn your system. You'll be much happier in the long run.

 

[Mindset]

Building our first little room. Is it important to tune your monitors post-output using an analyzer? I've seen(heard) situations where what you hear is not what you get on your disk. Any horror stories and resolutions anyone wants to share?

In the real world, you'll need to tune your room of course, very important. Majority (designers) use SMAART. You could have a great room, great monitors, but that does not necessarily mean that your getting accurate sound until you tune the room/monitors.

 

[danny.guitar]

I wouldn't be able to trust anything coming from my speakers if they were EQ'd or "tuned".

 

[Mindset]

I wouldn't be able to trust anything coming from my speakers if they were EQ'd or "tuned".

In a "perfect" listening enviornment, a good set would be as accurate as the lab it was tested in. In any other enviornment... yeah... Personally, I would trust it more if I knew that I'm not listening to more clutter along with the music or whatever, caused by a imperfect room etc. I would bet that if I took the mackies out of the studio I record in, and took it home, they would sound massively different. Just by adding a sound trap, your already starting to 'tune' the room to however you want x to sound.

 

[Freudian Slip]

Work on the room and learn the monitors. See how music you want to emulate sounds on your monitors with no eq and try to mix to that sound.
You'll have to learn any set of monitors you get. Better monitors require less learning of course. If you have speakers that don't represent certain frequencies well you could make your problems worse by eqing them.

F.S.

 

[mshilarious]

Practically speaking, it's impossible to EQ monitors to fix a room. The peaks and nulls in the bass frequencies are too dramatic to easily fix, even with a 1/3 octave graphic EQ. You would need something like a 12 band parametric.

And then, even once you do that, you could only fix the response at one position. Move your head a foot or two, and it's off again. That means that anybody else in your control room listening is going to hear an even more distorted response than they would without EQ.

If you track in the same room, EQing your monitors will not fix the room response that you record.

Finally, the EQ will cause your monitors to suffer some potentially severe distortion. Let's say your room needs +8dB at 80Hz. How well do you think your monitors are going to reproduce a boost like that?

In summary and in conclusion, you use an analyzer to evaluate your room treatment, not EQ.