Exactly. After 23 years of playing drums, and a lot of that time having the bass player's amp to my left, I can't stand listening to music unless I can also feel the low end. My EQs usually have a steep low end, depending on the system. And all those cymbals took a small toll on my high end, so the other end of the EQ is steep too. The rest of it gets tuned to the system/room.While this hint probably got a bunch of people to actually mess with the iTunes EQ, and there were good explanations of how boost causes distortion, I wouldn't really call it an OS X Hint. [ Reply to This # ] A 'perfect' iTunes equalizer setting Authored by: MostlyHarmless on Sep 03, '04 12:45:23AM Re: noise generator and spectrum analyzerI made an effort at doing that a couple of years ago... with a pink noise .wav file, the built-in mic on my PowerBook, and the spectrum analyzer in Amadeus. It turned out pretty well, actually.On my desktop Mac I looped the pink noise in iTunes. On my PowerBook I watched the real-time spectrum analyzer and adjusted the iTunes EQ until all the frequency bands were about the same (ignoring the extreme upper and lower frequencies where the built-in mic was obviously not registering).Once the pink noise looked good in the analyzer I did some listening tests to fine-tune the EQ settings -- since holding a PowerBook in front of my speakers wasn't quite the same as using a genuine calibrated mic. At that point I had a good EQ preset that made the system sound _much_ better.The next step would be to combine my baseline preset with the official Apple EQ presets. I thought I'd just dig into com.apple.iTunes.eq.plist and add & subtract from each band as necessary to create calibrated "Rock/Pop/Loudness/etc." presets. The EQ property list is kinda scary lookin' though, and I never got around to trying anything with AppleScript -- but after it was calibrated I didn't really use the other presets anyway.It seems like the easiest way to incorporate a baseline speaker calibration into the other presets, short of an actual hardware EQ, would be to loop through all the standard presets with AppleScript and create new, calibrated versions. If I could work out the proper syntax for "make new EQ preset" I'd be good to go...
There's no such thing as "perfect". Each song will have (probably) been processed by an EQ. Some bands seem to increase the bass for the crap-speaker market, so it actually sounds bad on good speakers. And if your speakers are tinny, then you're probably using a laptop, and tiny speakers are impossible to get good sound out of (even eMac speakers leave a lot to be desired).I have spent billions of hours tweaking my EQ, and have around 25 right now (for headphones, eMac speakers, and my two pairs through a 160-watt amp). I blast the room at night (the walls seem to be reasonably soundproof) to tweak my EQ. I use a few reference songs, which hopefully are mixed properly (i.e. made for "perfect" speakers).Why it seems to sound better is you're pushing up the treble. Let's use my eMac speakers as a reference. It doesn't really have enough "deep bass" (Gravity of Love). It should dip more around 250-500 Hz (eMac resonance ish, Torn). 8K is too high, so esses sound loud (Torn). 16K is a little too low. It doesn't quite compensate enough for bad midtones. It drops the bass sweep, too (Atomic Dance Explosion), though only big speakers can reproduce it properly.For the most part, you can compensate for bad speakers by turning everything down, and basically listening to one band at a time. 32 is really low bass. 64 is decent bass. 125 is cheap bass (the kind you get with "bass boost", the volume turned up, and crap speakers). 200 and 500 are midtones, 1K and 2K are "tinny", 4K is treble-ish, 8K is esses, and most of the high hat, and 16K is the rest of the high hat.Then, you just turn down the bands which sound like your crappy laptop speakers (or crappy "multimedia" speakers).
The Makka Drum and Bass Full Explosion (WAV)
** From the Blues from the Apple liner notes: Originally from New Orleans, Bobby [King] has spent a good deal of time on the road always looking for a gig. He has previously recorded with Charles and nowadays is associated with Larry Johnson. The fact that he works with a single instrument is as much a statement of the financial plight of a musician who makes his living from playing blues as it is a tribute to a percussionist who can create as much sound with a rigged snare and brushes as many drummers do with full paraphernalia. 2ff7e9595c
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