Metal Reviews

Over the years since I've gotten into music, a point of argument and confusion for me is equalizers. Sometimes I'll use them heavily, other times, like for the past six months or so, I've totally eschewed their use in favour of the "natural" feel of the original recording, and most people I know have that same feeling. I still can't decide if the extra clarity you can gain from the equalizers actually ruins the effect of the instruments meshing, due to the ability to remove a lot of the background noise that the clash of instruments can cause.

What do you think?

The only reason you would need to use an equalizer in a home listening situation would be to correct faults in the frequency response of your system (due to room resonances etc.)

EDIT: A bit of EQ can come in handy when listening to music in the car due to the noise of the engine, though.

I was gonna say exactly that. Unless you have expensive monitors you won't get the 'natural' feel of the orignial recording. So best to use EQ to get the sound that you like the best from your system, i'm always changing mine with pretty much every song.

I actually meant that EQ is more of a set-and-forget kind of thing. You can get all sorts of nasty accentuations in the frequency spectrum due to the fact that the usual living room has less-than-ideal acoustic properties. Use the EQ to get rid of those and you can pretty much leave the sliders alone after that.

Home stereo speakers are not monitors, but they do reproduce audio quite faithfully these days.

Oh i see what you mean. I find i use them all the time to get the right kind of sound for a particular track. Normal speakers will never reproduce the recording 100% right, but most do a good job, it just depends how anal you get about having the right sound.

I leave mine alone 'cause when I change something I can't tell if it sounds better, just different

Sometimes I'll be listening to some Dance music on my iPod and I'll put it on the Dance EQ setting, and it sounds a lot better for that type of music than the Rock EQ setting does. Then I'd listen to Cryptopsy, and I would proceed to have my head fucked until I realize that it's still on the Dance setting. I'll change it to Rock, and it sounds much better.

So I do use the EQ settings.

I use rock on the mp3 player and *checks winamp* apparently none on my computer.

What the great Noodle said. Also I remember once when my stereo had something like Bass Boost and Surround Sound enabled and then I bought one of Bruce Dickinson's CDs. And I was like this is baaaaadd, all I could hear was noise and no vocals. Then as soon as I disabled both those 2 things, all the CD came alive and everything sounded perfect. I think I like the non-changed natural sound unless extreme situations require something different.