The loss of control over your hi-fi: EQ, acoustics and psychoacoustics

A friend and I have a long-standing disagreement. Said friend is a gifted sound artist and composer and I like and respect his work very much. He also happens to work in a hi-fi shop.

Some time ago he invited me to his shop and offered to demonstrate some of the shop wares, and since I had never had such an experience and was curious towards the more “audiophile”, and hitherto unexplored, aspects of life, I happily agreed. I was taken to a specially arranged display room – a mock-up of a living room, complete with horse brasses and fire irons on cheerful, homely display – the centrepieces of which were an old leather sofa and some hair-raisingly expensive audio reproduction tools, designed very much for the more affluent consumer, placed in a properly studious and businesslike arrangement.

I was then played back, at my request, some familiar music for my aural consumption and comparison; I’d never heard music on such heavyweight equipment (the audio source being losslessly-encoded digital media captured from, if I remember correctly, compact disc). This system was, after all, valued at something in the region of £30,000, some 150 times the value of my home audio set up, and was easily the most valuable and carefully designed audio equipment I’ve ever experienced.

Having never listened to my favourite music in such a scenario I was definitely expecting to hear the heightened audio quality that a system worth well over the UK national average annual wage¹ could produce. As the first track subsided and the first trickles of cognition began to coalesce I was shocked to realise the unthinkable – I didn’t like it. I disliked it to the point that I considered that even if I had won this system in a competition (incidentally, a system worth over ten times as much as my most expensive purchase in my life, ever) I would not have been pleased with it, and would presumably be already considering the potential resale value to an audiophile more suited.

Chiefly, the most noticeable issue was with the vocals getting somewhat lost in the mix; the frequency range I roughly identified to be around the 8-10kHz mark. Something curious and previously inexperienced was happening to this slice of sound (something akin to the track’s mastered ‘ducking’² technique being systematically destroyed in a manner that might be compared to a child scribbling over your passport in marker pen), and as I leaned over and began to ask the question I knew what the answer would be:

‘I don’t suppose this system has an EQ, does it?’

The answer was, of course, a firm ‘no’. My friend and I had had this discussion in depth previously and, as I had come to understand, EQ controls on modern high-end home audio playback equipment are very much out of favour; a defunct and dystopian remnant of systems past, an embarrassing blemish to be hidden in the history books and steered smartly around for the modern discerning audio consumer. Even the meekest enquiry into the reasoning for such technological abandonment seems to be greeted with the stern ‘you should hear the music as it has been intended to be heard by the mastering engineer’ riposte, sometimes accompanied by its smaller sibling ‘an EQ circuit destroys the purity of the audio signal path’.

This point of view does seem to be widespread – the maxim that EQ should be adjusted by the creators of the music (or the engineers at least, though I personally might not differentiate too heavily between the two) during the creative part of the process, i.e., back at the mastering suite; that the finished product is somehow sacred, concrete and enshrined, laminated and untouchable.

To paraphrase Henry Ford, I believe this view is more or less bunk. Ford was a man who knew a little about making ubiquitous and accessible technology; a technology which has concurrently become fawned over and fetishised since its original and perhaps more honest inception. When stripped to its barest bones, the pursuit of the audiophile is that of fidelity – to beat the signal to noise ratio with its own self-reflective stick; to exorcise the ghost in its own machine.

It seems to me the lengths to which those on the ultimate reproductive sonic quest will go to are almost limitless, certainly financially (I was also shown a system which totalled up to some £250,000); but I am here to heave in the proverbial spanner – it is my firm and considered opinion that to leave an EQ control off any audio player (yes, any audio player) amounts to a grave and serious error, and far from complimenting the listening experience is leaving a gaping space for actually destroying it altogether.

Surely not? I mean, people invest thousands in hi-fi gear. They can’t be wrong. I mean, the development and manufacturing processes are honed to the nearest thousandth of an inch, it is a knowledgeable industry run by intelligent people, for those consumers who care so much that they are listening to the best a recording has to offer that they invest enough to pay off a small country’s national debt to satisfy their quest for the most perfect and accurate sonic reproduction possible. And who am I? I’ve just experienced the tip of a very large electromagnetic iceberg for the very first time, and here I am dismissing it?

That’s because the core of this argument is not a technical issue but an ideological one.

To be certain, it is easy to make technical arguments when the EQ question is examined away from the frothy-mouthed marketing and heady figures. In sound reproduction and listening there are a number of acoustic factors that must be taken into account, and, I believe, even the most ambitious hi-fi cannot address these. Put very simply, if you want to hear the record as it was ‘intended to be heard’, you need to be sitting in the very seat of the mastering engineer as the record was completed. Further, you need to be that engineer. You need his or her ears, his or her brain and his or her head, too. If we might bravely shine the technical light upon the issue for a moment, sound behaves in a predictable yet complex way. It is composed of waves which are reflected by surfaces into which it collides and collapses back into itself, waves comprised of the allegorical watery ripples which will mingle, interfere, override as well as have no impact whatsoever upon each other. Bearing this in mind, asserting that your very expensively engineered hi-fi reproduces exactly the correct and faithful response from the rendered master and this is what travels to your ears through whichever shaped room, bouncing from your differently textured furnishings, through your differently shaped aural canals onto your differently sized eardrums is just plain delusional. There is no way even the most determined consumer could hope to replicate what they deem to be the ‘correct’ reproduction as heard in the mastering suite.

Of course, these differences are not overly noticeable. They are not some yawning chasm into which the sound waves throw themselves sacrificially. However, in an industry where there is a machine for routinely shaking (yes, shaking) cables a prescribed number of times in order to attempt a signal quality enhancement, the above must count for something. It is an uncontrollable (to a degree anyway) unknown quantity; and I can imagine how it might drive an audiophile round the bend should they pay it too much mind.

So instead, maybe, they stick to the axiom that the more expensive the gear, and the more gold plated the connectors, the better the sound. To a greater or lesser extent, of course, I would agree – my £200 system will never sound the same as one which costs ten or a hundred times that; but when entering cable-shaking country I believe it begins to count towards something.

Now that the emperor might begin to realise he is perhaps a little chilly and that maybe his transparent robes might not be as woolly warm as he might like them (it’s okay, your Highness, you still look lovely), let us examine for a moment what this might mean. The ultimate implication for this is, of course, that one might never get as close to that pure sound as one might like. Which, I am aware, most would probably acknowledge, and be content with getting as close as they could possibly manage, and be satisfied with that, and of course that is fine. It is the next leap that signals the ideological differential.

Since it is not possible to achieve 100% reproductive purity, why not put some controls on your hi-fi equipment to help you get back what might be lost in ambient transmission? Or, better still, tune the collage of output frequencies to your own ears – you know, how you like to hear them: your own personal preference?

When looking at a graph of human aural frequency response you will notice it spikes in sensitivity around the region of human speech. It is to be expected – we have evolved to hear each other more clearly than the surrounding ambience. The effect on sonic reproduction when played back through a flat (that is to say, unaltered) EQ is that it will typically sound a bit nasally and muddy – what you are experiencing is your Neanderthal perception boosting those muddying frequencies in order to underline the speech more clearly. To counteract this, a lot of hi-fi amplification systems will ‘scoop’ the EQ for you at the amplification stage whether you like it or not, dropping those middle frequency bands and reinvigorating your music with its crisp clarity and punch. While this aural trickery may not be present on the more high-end, po-faced range of stereos, it does further underline the point that if flat equalisation is so important to you as a listener, perhaps you need to seek it out for yourself, however unnerving it might be to seat yourself behind the wheel.

This then, is the nub of the issue – why let someone else, with their ears, their equipment, their anechoic mixing room, decide how you want to hear the music? What makes their choices so unalterable and enshrined?

As much as the recording engineer has had a tinker with the sound, so has the mastering engineer, and now you as the consumer have the controls. The music is already far, far from its original sound (how many drum kits do you hear played live that actually sound like they do on recordings?), what makes the above any better placed to decide what you like to hear than you yourself? Of what might one be so afraid?

The secondary argument can also be summarily despatched here. The amount of noise added into an electronic audio signal path by a series of carefully crafted EQ controls does not need to be a big, insurmountable issue, especially when considering the destruction rendered onto the audio in its traversing fresh air and navigating your room acoustics. Should you not want to even factor it in and wish to eliminate the option altogether, well, there’s always the bypass button.

Please understand, I am not saying that EQ should be applied to every situation, every recording, every time. It is a user-configurable device and there is clearly a balance to be struck and common sense to be applied. Dismissing, though, the idea of your own audio purchases being somehow sacrosanct is a powerful and empowering one and should be available to all. I’m sure we each have a record we think is just a little underproduced, lacks a little punch here or is a bit cutting there – the jettisoning of the anti-EQ meme (for that, I believe, is key to the device’s continued exclusion) will, for certain, make an impression, and improve our listening experience beyond our expectation.

It is time to seize control of our own aural input once again, to let imprisoned recordings once again be given the freedom to speak to us as best we understand, cultivated by the interactivity afforded us by a simple series of switches.

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¹http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=285

²for an explanation of this term please see http://www.sweetwater.com/expert-center/glossary/t–Ducker