Bass and Treble controls

[jenson]

blasphemy! is it? guys, was wondering if there is some bass and treble related DIY done...i sometimes miss those controls, especially on LP's where those LP magic pushes to to squeeze some more juice out of it.

any thoughts..

 

[ShutterX]

i call blasphemy!!

Isnt the most natural sounding 'real' music best? And amps have this control anyway, although i never use them.

 

[jls001]

I would love to have high quality EQ, not to mention bass and treble knobs. The ability to get a sound of one's liking is no blasphemy.

Here's an alternative: if you're playing your songs from a media player on a computer, tweak the EQ to suit your room and sonic taste. I find tweaking foobar EQ very rewarding. A typical curve I use is to attenuate 1 kHz to -0.7 dB and 20 kHz to -2 dB. Adjust the values between these two frequencies so that the curve gradually drops from 1 kHz to 20 kHz. Values below 1 kHz also will need slight adjustments so that the curve doesn't suddenly drop at 1 kHz.

Of course this is only an example that happens to suit my room and my listening taste. You can try variations of this or try something different.

 

[jenson]

Joshua, im getting to PC based audio soon..foobar eq sounds like a good option.

however, my primary need is for LP's. i earlier had the pulz pre-amp which had decent phono and the option to tweak EQ. i used to enjoy liberal dose on albums from Daft Punk, Fleetwood Mac Rumors for eg.

would love to see if there are some good DIY options in this space...

 

[Hari Iyer]

@ Jenson.

You can add a diy tone amplifier (low, mids, highs) using audiophile grade op-amps if you have a separate phono-premaplifier. The tone control can be placed after the phono pre-amp stage and before the power amplifier. You can also have the option to by-pass them if required. Not difficult to design IMO.

 

[drgb]

Ohh for the good old days when that small bass-extension button made all the difference in sound!
However I've always thought tone controls make the music sound more artificial and this feeling hasn't changed after all these years.
Digital EQing on Foobar effects fidelity by quite a margin since you're routing your music data through a computer algorithm which will add/subtract god knows how many pieces of extra data packets just to give you a false sense of "attenuation" or "accentuation" of certain frequencies. Not a good idea.
If one is hell bent on EQing on Foobar though; may I suggest using TB-EZQ; it's a zero latency VST plugin designed on the works of Andrew Sabin and Bryan Pardo from the interactive audio lab. From my perspective this is the best EQing software I've ever used and one that affects fidelity the least. It's slightly tricky to setup but once done, I can promise you'll never need anything else. It's stupidly easy to use and surprisingly effective.
TB Equaliser V3 from the same brand is their full fledged equalization suite which includes the options for frequency calibrations and other advanced EQ hijinkery, but it's mostly aimed at recording artists and the like. Although it is the one to use if you need exact control.