To Equalize or Not to Equalize

I try not to introduce any eq but in a couple of cases it’s worth it.

I just use the Roon eq.

Roon has suggested eq for every headphone and I find it worth it. I travel with earphones and headphones for my daily music fix.

I have some open baffle speakers (2nd system) without subs so I boost the low end some with good results. With a sub that would probably go away.

I have a lot of room treatment in my listening roon so it sound good without EQ.

Hope that helps.

There's an interesting thing I see happen with most people when using an EQ. They create, visually, a Fletcher-Munson curve. Whether they need it or not. Boost both ends. It just looks good. Clueless to the added distortion by boosting. (they could put in the curve by cutting instead of boosting but they don't) The smoother the curve the better. 

My son works at an Audi dealership. Almost every car that comes in for service has this curve boost put in the EQ. Almost every system is way overly bright and bass boosted. NOT good sounding at all. This is what they do with an EQ.

I’m a Loki fan and have a couple of those (headphone rig, TV) and was an early adopter of the Loki Max. Having used various pro EQs it was interesting how Schiit designed the Max (and all the rest of the Lokis). It does not behave like a pro EQ which to people who can’t grasp that fact makes it seem somehow less effective than the pro stuff. It was never supposed to act like a standard pro EQ. The remote is a great feature (I use Chicken Head knobs so I can easily see where everything is) and I rarely need the Max anyway, but when I do, it’s perfect and utterly transparent.  Wilson took the name Loki for their sub and I still think that's kinda lame.

If you are open to getting a used EQ I can recommend a DBX 10/20 Equalizer. It is a 10 band EQ with memory settings so you can save and recall several different profiles. The unit also has a real time analyzer but you would need to find one where the owner has the original microphone. I have two of these, a 14/20 for my main system and a 10/20 for my desktop system. There are usually a few of them for sale on eBay selling for $400 to $800 depending on condition.

First, get REW (it's freeware) and a calibrated microphone (e.g. MiniDSP umik-1). Take in-room measurements for L and R channels independently at your listening position. These and other measurements will reveal much about your acoustics that you may not be aware of presently. It's a no-brainer.

With those measurements, you can compare your response to the Harman and NAD target curves (they're very similar), and you will have a solid idea of what to do with EQ settings. Without those baseline measurements that serve as your point of reference, you're playing "Pin the Tail on the Donkey." If you know what that is, then you'll understand the analogy. REW allows one to dial in the appropriate settings for each channel. 

I used a dbx 2231 graphic EQ for a long time with very good results, which is an economical and reasonably transparent platform with 31 octave resolution. Accuphase used to make a nice graphic EQ (G18), and examples in good working order remain expensive. There are boutique, studio quality graphic and parametric EQs that are very good, some being certainly better than others. The downside is they all insert another cluster of pedestrian electronics and additional connections/cables into the signal path, and some degradation (e.g. soundstage) tends to become apparent if the system is resolving enough. 

If you use a digital platform that supports inserting a text parametric EQ files for headphone or speaker correction, then you are in luck because REW can use your L and R measurements with a target curve of your choosing to generate PEQ files that will put you on target. I eventually found this to be the superior in terms of integrity and sound quality and I cannot see myself ever returning to a hardware EQ.