EQ software

Working with a pretty good EQ for Mac. Trialing Audirvana + again and pretty impressed with sound. Using Tokyo Dawn Labs Slick EQ to tame a bit of shoutiness on my speaker system. 1.5db cut at 2.6khz with American curve. It is free simple program with only a few settings that works for me so far. A bit of focus and depth loss, but not bad. Comes in plenty of versions. I use the Audio Units one on Mac.

Have not used the PC version with my headphones. I got really depressed when I brought my headphone setups tweaked Win 7 laptop down to the main system. The PC sounded not as open and rolled, maybe even muddy in comparison running Foobar. Must be the hardware, right?

Are laptops just that bad as a source? I thought my old Macbook was great until I heard a mini, bummer.

 

Foobar2000 using the VST 2.4 adapter (foo_vst)

 

A few years ago I played with a few different free VST plugins (don't remember which ones anymore) and settled on EasyQ. It was quick and simple to use, and let me alter L/R separately very easily.

 

I just wanna make sure everyone tries the amazing genious that is Tokyo Dawn's free plugin SlickEQ. It's such a smart and simple shaping EQ.

 

Have you tried the Nova plugin from TDR? I am getting ready to try it for a more surgical cut.

 

Well, as much as I liked Slick EQ, I really like Nova so far. The real time graph makes it easier to find the offending peaks at the top of the vocal range. And the adjustable Q makes cutting it very good. Even less disturbance to air, space and depth vs SlickEQ. And A+ has not crashed (unlike Slick EQ) yet when pausing or stopping, fingers crossed.

 

Not yet, but I'm planning on using it for mixing purposes. I'm in love with SlickEQ and Kotelnikov though!

 

I don't use EQ on my playback system (probably because I work in audio and don't want to bring "work" into "play", haha). I own most of the Universal Audio plugins and also have a couple of outboard (analog) EQs: Maag eq4 (500 series pair), Dangerous Bax & Elysia xfilter.

I'm happy with the analog-modeled UA plugs and think those who want to emulate analog circuitry in a clean (digital) environment should check these out, they really have some of the best-sounding analog modeled plug-ins (for analog character, in case you want to spice up your digital playback). Just running audio through the Pultec can give sources a nice "analog" emulated punch. For surgical uses (narrow Qs and a slew of cut filters) I like their Cambridge EQ.

 

I noticed that UAPP for Android just got updated and they have ToneBoosters TB Equalizer Parametric EQ included now (modest in-app purchase required). This is a nice addition from a functionality perspective for Android. UAPP continues to impress me over Onkyo and other Android players.

Toneboosters TB EQ is also available as a VST plugin - anyone have an opinion of their desktop stuff?

 

I am using several of the TB plugins and I like them.
They have a large array of EQ 'types' which makes them easier to match a specific EQ curve I need to be able to replicate in reverse.

JJ

 

I find that Nova insta-crashes every time I try to name a preset- which is extremely tedious. It's no fun being unable to save presets.

 

Sorry to hear that. I vaguely recall I had some issues with that as well, but not sure if it crashed or just that it would not save, but I figured it out eventually.

I have since converted all my music systems to Win based pcs and use Foobar 2k, but have not needed to do any eq with my systems, so not really using TDL at the moment. I did do a test with Foo and Nova and it worked well with the Win version.

Good luck, hope you get it figured, maybe try to see if a new version is avail and reinstall?

 

Sadly, it was the current version installed today, hosted inside foo_vst. It's a shame, as the UI is lovely, and it doesn't seem to murder the sound much.

 

I use equilibrium in free phase mode. You can drag the phase of any of your eq bands to make it minimum phase, linear or anything in between. I'm minimum under 800hz and linear above. Equilibrium creator said somewhere on kvr or gearslutz that this is the most transparent setup.

That said, i used to use pro q 2, but i find dmg better sounding, more flexible, and you can use more than 24 band if you have to do complex correction in the stereo spectrum in addition to linearize the headphone response.

Here's my eq curve and equilibrium settings for my k712 pro. Takes about 15% of my i7 cpu so it's not suited to weak computers.





The curve is derived from the sonarworks k712 averaged profile and adapted to my headphones and hearing, to make a sine sweep sound as smooth as possible. The settings are probably the most transparent you can dial for any eq. If you have the plugin, give them a try.

Edit to wish a merry christmas to all sbaf!

 

I was also thinking at another use for equilibrium, however i'm just speculating here because i don't have full knowledge of this side of things to be absolutely certain of how to implement this, but here's the idea:

equilibrium has another feature called extended frequencies, which extend the frequencies at which the software operate to half the (project) sampling rate. This could open, together with the phase settings and the vast choice of LP types, interesting possibilities to use it as an upsampling/downsampling filter with nos dacs.
It should be possible to use the maximum impulse length setting and work with the windows shape to create a filter which would best even the most expensive dac filters, and use the processing power of modern pc to apply it before the dac. I think that for processing powers constrains there isn't any dac that use filters of the quality of those into equilibrium; correct me if i'm wrong.

However there is a problem, the feature doesn't seem to work inside the jriver plugin implementation. It does work into daws. It also would need a checkbox to deactivate the filters in the jriver output format tabs and use only equilibrium, otherwise the signal would be filtered two times. But in theory it should work.

What do you guys think? Am i saying bulshit or is this a possibly good idea?

 

Slight update, I think the actual problem is the foo_vst rather than the plugin- I might have unfairly accused it. I've noticed similar instability with other VSTs (including EasyQ and Sonarworks) now. I saw a couple of complaints on the relevant Hydrogenaudio thread (I think) that it has some issues on Win 10 x64.. so maybe that's what's up. That's kind of a shame, as I do like Foobar, but like to have VSTs available in there.

The Foobar "online troubleshooter" (from the help menu) actually lists it as problematic, too:

The VST host plugin on this page works:

http://www.yohng.com/software/foobarvst.html

It's a bit fiddly, and seems to only allow one VST at a time, but it's better than nothing. The online crash reporter also lists it as dubious, but at least it supports saving presets without bombing out. Neither is an ideal solution, but people can choose their own tradeoffs, I suppose.

 

That's the reason i switched from foobar to jriver. I'm all for free software, and used foobar for a long time. But the vst support is really fidly like you said, so i downloaded the jriver trial and i haven't looked back since.

Vst in jriver is really well implemented and user friendly, and another plus (maybe placebo but i don't think so because i wasn't really expecting it), sound quality seems a lot better.

I used to listen at my music in ableton live lately because i could experiment with vst chain as much as i wanted, but there the music management was lacking obviously as it is a daw and not a listening software.

Well jriver to me sounds miles better than foobar and even ableton, the vst support is spot on, and the music library management pretty good for my needs. Only caveat is that if you need two instances of the same plugin you can't have them. You can add ass much plugins as you can as far as i can tell, but only one instance for any given vst.

Another plus for jriver is that you can install a wdm driver to route music from the browser or other software into it without the need to deal with virtual audio cables and vst hosts (simply choose jriver as the default music device in windows audio), so you can listen to youtube or movies in streaming with your vst chain without additional software.

If you need vst support and a good music listening software, the 49 $ for jriver are money well spent!

 

On this machine, I have a very special monitoring setup. I actually route all audio through the Linux main (even windows with low latency), so this all can go through the equalizer.

The equalizer I use is CALF plugins 12-band parametric equalizer.[0] It is an LV2, LADSPA or Jack Audio Connection Kit application, open source. The equalizers in it are classic RBJ cookbook[1] ones and there's a plenty of them. CALF equalizer also has a very useful feature of applying a band to only one of the channels. This is all tied and managed in Carla[2] effect rack application.
Single precision floating point is sometimes a drawback when using high q low frequency bands, but that is rarely needed.

Generally the main feature is the decent GUI (though I still loathe knobs, these at least have fine control; LV2 version can have separate textual control) and the built in analyzer. The fact that it's based on the typically used implementation of filters makes it easy to port settings to and from it.

For reference, it is quite possible to route whole Windows audio through the Windows version of Jack Audio Connection Kit, but I haven't yet seen the windows version of CALF ever; you'd have to build it yourself. You'd also need one of those virtual audio cable drivers. I used VB-Audio hi-fi[3] for some stuff, works great, but Windows version of Jack had issues preventing truly low latency audio - bottoms at 1024 frames which isn't good enough for monitoring. It is good enough for streaming, playing instruments, music etc.
As it is now, I use a specially set up virtual machine for Windows stuff - and it outputs sound into Linux with latency more than good enough for monitoring.

(Late edit: Minimum phase eq is better to use against a real minimum phase system such as most mechanical ones like headphones. FIR equivalent in linear phase would be super large and thus add a lot of latency.)

[0] CALF - the silly pupper site - http://calf-studio-gear.org/
[1] RBJ cookbook: http://www.musicdsp.org/files/Audio-EQ-Cookbook.txt
[2] KXStudio Carla - http://kxstudio.linuxaudio.org/Applications:Carla - Has internal portable improved GUI for CALF, making it possible to use in Windows properly too if built. Might also work without Jack on Windows, haven't tried.
[3] VB-Audio Cable: http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Cable/ In the past used it with VSTHost but VSTHost is a crummy crashy high latency app. Carla is way better.
[4] Jack Audio Connection Kit: http://www.jackaudio.org/

 

there's a competitor to sonarworks now. accidentally posted a new thread instead of posting here.

http://www.toneboosters.com/tb-morphit/

more cans and you can apply the fr of other cans rather than just doing it to linear

 

I'm currently using ToneBoosters EQ to compensate more accurately for my modded 800's.
It works rather well due to the large number of different EQ types they have available.

I'll probably try this HP EQ plugin of theirs and for $30 it certainly is affordable, let alone the free trial to see if it is 'better' than the other attempts I have made.

JJ
Addendum…
I did try it but is a fairly simple EQ and lacks some features I currently need in order to consolidate all of my present EQ.
Still as an alternative to Sonarworks and for its simplicity and lower cost, it might be suitable for some.

JJ