[Empeg-general] Re: Equaliser

[Rob Voisey]

You can spend hours playing with the advanced EQ settings to compensate for the quirks of in-car audio and achieve a flat-sounding result.  In other words, the goal is to distort the waveform to compensate for flaws in the environment and make it SOUND as if it isn't distorted at all.

HOWEVER in the vast majority of cases my advice for setting the EQ would be to work with the default bands and simply tweak them to achieve a sound that you enjoy.  Forget the science - a few minutes of trial and error should reveal how each band affects the output, and you should be able to find settings that sound nicer than others.

In the case of our demo car, I tweak the bottom two bands down by a couple of dB to compensate for a tendancy the 8" Kappa's in the front have to get jiggy with their plastic covers.  The sub gain is set a little high, so the reduced bass compensates for that as well.  I also tweak the treble up a tiny amount to bring the door tweeters to life, and (quite probably) to compensate for the effects of listening to too much loud acid techno over the years.

The result is far from an audiophile dream but it's a sound that I enjoy, the cones don't try to blow the door trim apart, and it's punchy enough to bring a smile to the face of reviewers.  On a new player it takes about 30 seconds to set the EQ for this.

If we were to sit John (our audio type person) in the car I'm confident that he would spend hours tweaking the EQ, but for my own listening pleasure I don't feel the need to do that.  I guess what I'm trying to say is, don't be scared to screw around with the simple EQ settings and see what happens.  If you don't like the result, you don't have to hit "save"!

Rob