Graphics Equalizers

So, I picked up my new turntable yesterday. It's a Garrard 401 in a custom plinth (two-tiered resin-impregnated carbon fibre with various isolation devices) an SME 3009 and a Shure V15VXMR cartridge. It is really terrific.

The guy who sold it (not the previous owner) is a broadcast engineer and has some terrific equipment.

But he insisted that an integral part of his kit was his graphics equaliser. And I have to say that it made a significant improvement to the sound quality.

Given this, why aren't graphics equalisers more popular? I read in an old post here that they are pooh-poohed by "audiophiles" - is that because they're a bit artificial.

 

Broadcast engineers like them, but graphic equalisers inevitably introduce distortion of various kinds. With very expensive ones, the effect is minimal, but most audiophiles think that equalisation is unnecessary in a well-selected system, and any tonal imbalance should be slight and not worth the compromise of an equaliser. Shure cartridges have a falling top response, and may well benefit from top boost.

If you like the sound, there is not a problem, the deck as a whole suits the rest of your system, so if it ain't bust, don't fix it. But should the sound pall a bit after a while, the first change is likely to be of the cartridge, which you could sell, then buy a more modern cartridge with flatter response (such as an Ortofon or AT moving magnet) and have cash to spare, imv.

 

Back in the late 1970s - early 1980s the uk amplifier market became dominated by a small number of companies producing products without tone controls. With the aid of the audio press, the idea that all tone controls were bad became a sort of evangelical mantra - amplifiers going against the new wisdom were automatically labelled as poor.

The argument against tone controls is that they introduce distortion into the system and offer limited use.
On the first point, yes bad circuits can introduce forms of distortion but enough good examples exist that will show the most miniscule effect on distortion. So you have a choice, or rather you should have a choice.
You can either have your amplifier THD go from say 0.005% to 0.007%, or you can suffer the gross distortions that result from poor room acoustics.

On the second point, are they useful, that depends on the control in question. Simple bass and treble controls are of limited use but decent phase compensated ones offering limited range can be useful in applying subtle correction. At the other extreme, full on graphic and parametric EQ can often make the difference between a poor/average sounding system and great one.
Companies such as Quad, Arcam and Cambridge offer good basic tone controls. At the other end you have professional units from the likes of Yamaha though Lyngdorf and Accuphase offer great solutions, albeit at high cost.

As you said in your post "I have to say that it made a significant improvement to the sound quality" - and there you have your answer.

Most amplifiers with tone controls offer the option of a full bypass which is sensible. Sadly even that is a step too far for some.

 

That is not sad. The use of tone controls betokens a system that does not have a neutral balance, and that can and should be achieved by careful component selection and positioning, particularly of loudspeakers, which should be selected to suit the intended positioning and room characteristics. The best speakers have dispersion patterns that make them relatively independent of room resonances, though of course headphones remove the problem altogether (as well as providing more information than speakers can). If a system cannot be made to achieve reasonable neutrality, the likelihood is that there is more wrong with it than just tonal imbalance. Good hi-fi gear is made to reproduce a natural balance in a domestic situation. And expensive does not necessarily mean good in this context.

Tone controls are sometimes useful because recordings sometimes go beyond what is acceptable in terms of tonal balance, though that does not happen so much these days. Even users who have tone controls never move them from the neutral position, or turn off 'defeat', for weeks on end, if at all. Systems using amps without tone controls can give and have given the greatest long-term satisfaction, using good software.

It is no surprise whatever that a system using a Shure cartridge or microphone benefits from what one may suppose is a costly professional equaliser. It would be more surprising if it didn't.

 

Cartridge aside, my understanding was that even a great system will have its sound distorted by the room that it is being used in (unless you're in a studio or something) and that the equalizer's first purpose was to correct the effects of the room, not an imbalanced system. No?

 

Good equalisers are very expensive, but are a necessity for professionals in studios, and that is the perspective that this engineer has given you. It's not applicable to you, unless you have ten grand to waste. Cheap ones are not the same as tone controls by a long way. They were introduced to audio, rather than hi-fi, partly as a gimmick to sell gear, partly because speakers and cartridges at the time were awful. Nobody had heard of a speaker stand in those days. And hardly anyone uses equalisers today, unless they are really loaded with the stuff.

What this engineer's advice amounts to is that the Shure is not bringing out the best in the deck; you are lucky in having a bright system that compensates, if only partially, for the dull top end of the Shure. If you have a modern amp with tone controls, wind up the treble and you likely won't suffer much. But bear in mind that a better cartridge will probably in time give more satisfaction, in more ways, than the Shure.

 

Look out for professionals selling off high quality analogue equalisers cheap. Most users want digital units now and this has as much to do with ease of use (presets, etc.) than anything else. IMO a good analogue unit still sounds better.

I picked up a Klark Teknik 1/3 octave EQ for only £40 on eBay. They retailed for over £500 when new. Problem is, it's only mono and I only have one so far

 

That would be great in a perfect world and with perfect equipment, but we have neither.
Most people are stuck with the room they have and have to accommodate a system within practical constraints.
Even with a dedicated room, it will have LF modes that cannot be eliminated with careful positioning.
And why shouldn't you have some control over the recording balance?
To use a food analogy, most people use seasoning to taste - individual taste. A purist might eat their food without any seasoning which is fine, but there is nothing wrong with someone else adding a little salt n pepper.

We apply tonal correction all the time by altering speaker height, distance from walls, toe-in, we choose cartridges that are richer, leaner, brighter and some go to extreme lengths by severely bumping up cable capacitance or inductance.

A couple of knobs on the front to let you adjust balance easily at will isn't a problem, it just makes life easier.

 

Rob, really helpful stuff, thanks.
Steretopye - call it a wild hunch but is there any chance you've got something against Shure cartridges?
Rob/Andy - I'm having trouble finding out more about GEs - are there any particular good models to look out for?

 

I think most systems could benefit form a simple parametric eq. I'm still trying to find a simple, high quality unit to slot into my system.

Most of the pro units are a bit OTT for the domestic environment. The Klark Teknik DN410 was an industry standard analogue parametric EQ. Their equivalent graphic equaliser is the DN360.

BSS, dbx, Yamaha also do some more simple looking units. Not as well regarded at KT though really.

 

Not at all. I have one, somewhere! Shures are well known for their drooping top responses, and that includes your model. They are well suited to bright systems, and many people like them because they sound warm. I'm a democrat, I wouldn't dream of trying to tell them they are wrong.

The engineer was probably trying to tell you that the Shure needs top boost if it is going to sound neutral, in a nice, if rather ham-fisted way, by mentioning his equaliser. Ain't it time you took the hint? But you say it sounds great at home, so forget about equalisers, enjoy the music. But if after a month or three you want something better, and sooner or later that happens with just about everything, you know what to do. I'm not trying to advocate spending more, because that Shure fetches a high price on the used market. Personally, I'd sell it straight away and replace it with something more to my taste, but your taste is not my taste.

Having said that, my standard advice is to clean up every contact in your system from the mains plug onwards, including fuses and contacts, using a cleaner such as Kontak. It will be the best £15-worth you ever spent. Also, tighten the screws on the SME headshell as much as you reasonably can. Be careful doing that, though. You'll get a brighter, tighter sound just from doing those things. Unless it's already been done, of course.

 

But most people don't use equalisers. And most audiophiles think it's heresy to do so. So perhaps you're exaggerating the problem?

But it's unlikely that eigentones will be eliminated with ordinary bass tone controls, which are ok for the odd LP with excess/reduced bass. The way to get rid of general bass boom is to give attention to the system itself. And usually, positioning, getting a clean power supply, tightening speaker nuts etc., solves that sort of problem.

Because most people will balls it up if they try to get into doing that. Equalisers in amateur systems are good toys, but rarely more than that. Most recordings are miles better than most domestic systems, and a system that reproduces well even an indifferent recording has an engaging quality to it that makes tonal balance somewhat irrelevant.

As my guests say when they come to dinner, "Chef knows best." There's no cruet on my table, either.

Exactly. There's more than enough room for manouevre in those things. And that's before considering system hygiene.

Occasionally, yes, for poor recordings, though most people don't bother in practice, particularly with all-digital sources. Tone controls can also be used as a temporary measure until a neutral component can solve a balance problem. We maybe agree on that much- but the question is about equalisers. And I think that most people, including this questioner, have more basic things to deal with than equalisers. We haven't even thought about checking cartridge alignment, always tricky with Shures, though maybe the engineer sorted that.

 

No, I hear plenty of bad systems

Simple system tweaks often aren't enough.
As you rightly say, a bass control is of limited use on a room eigentone, but it can help. Parametric EQ however, after you have done everything to get the positioning right can be the different between a tuneless boom and music.

 

Genuinely, he was just saying that he belived in graphics equalisers to "put back what the room takes out" - it wasn't a cartridge-specific thing, I'm sure of it.

Anyway, the system sounds incredible at home, especially since I got the phonostage working.

Honestly, I should write it all up in one of my other threads but my stuff is making a better noise than any of the other TTs I tried, even though that was through much more expensive pre-amps, amps and speakers and in a dealer-room set-up. I am just blown away by the 401.

 

But thanks for the other tips regarding cleaning things up and tightening screws, I will definitely keep it in mind. I'm pretty happy with it all right now though. Including high notes - Emma Kirkby singing Purcell has been one of my test records and it sounds wonderful right now as I'm listening to it.

 

Do you use a computer and play music from hard disc/dac?
If so you can download EQ software and experiment with the effects.

 

Don't we all. But equalisers are very rarely the solution.

That is precisely what they very often are. It's been proved many a time. People think they need a new, more expensive component, when all they need is a bit of elbow grease and know-how. One can hear when one should reach for the spanner because speaker bolts are slightly loose.

At the expense of screwing up the overall bass response. It is generally best to live with eigentones. They are not all-pervasive, like bass boom.

A tuneless boom is not the result of eigentones, which are of narrow bandwidth. Unless the acoustic is really dire and unsuitable.

 

Not through my hi-fi system; only for the iPod. Again, thanks though. If I do get into it in the future I will give that a try.

 

Ok, fair enough, but few audiophiles agree.

Then that's great.

I'm not surprised. People don't realise the importance of the front end, particularly with vinyl.

 

She's a good test of HF and MF. Shures are excellent trackers and won't break up under those conditions.