Pro Sound Web: As I was preparing for our recent OptEQ workshop in Dallas, a few things crystallized for me, the most fundamental being “what is equalization?” If you ask 10 audio practitioners this simple question, you’re likely to get 10 different answers.
In the most literal sense, equalization means to “make equal.” But make what equal? Here are some thoughts for consideration.
2 comments:
This article does do a gapped job outlining and explaining the different applications of equalization, however I feel that without a strong background in sound the average reader would still be left wondering what EQ is.This might be me being picky because the article seems to be geared toward technicians, but I feel like it would be really simple to take a few sentences and explain what EQ is in more descriptive terms than just a filter. The articles also goes into more complicated descriptions types of equalizers, and it just felt weird to me that they would be trying to explain what equalization is without describing what those types of devices do. The part of the article I did enjoy was where there was description in the different purposes of EQ, such as tonal correction, artistic decisions on how something should sound, and tuning the room to the speaker arrangement. Though I again would urge that author to better mind those interested in sound with no real background, this article definitely does a decent job of describing EQ, its subjectiveness, and how it can be used for several different purposes both artistic and functional.
This was an interesting article to read, because for the past week I’ve been struggling with the EQ on Wolves. This article didn’t do much shed light on how to fix my problems (and even if it did it’s too late now), but I now know specifically what my issues were. Beside some general lack of corrective equalization (if there had been more time with just actors and a quiet space we could have gotten things to be a bit cleaner, but alas this show had a unique process and footprint), our main issue was room EQ. There were some specific high frequency sounds that reverberated throughout the space, and they made their way back into the mics. It created a huge challenge in trying to keep the levels high enough that the audience could hear what was being said without having the slight ringing of those frequencies snowball into feedback. I don’t know much about EQ, which I probably should seeing as I’ve declared sound design, but hopefully Joe will cover it fairly extensively in production audio at some point.
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