"Listening Position" EQ

While doing the disc player tests using Santana's Supernatural much of the listening I did was semi-serious.  I was paying attention, but not sitting in the listening position.

So one good thing that might have come out of these tests (along with showing the Oppo BDP-205 is technically superior and any advantages other players might have had seem to disappear when the level matching is perfected) is that I was reminded that I still haven't solved the bass problem very well.

The basic problem is that the listening position is in a uniquely bad position for bass, and I basically can't change that because my Living Room is a multipurpose room, not a dedicated listening room.  In a dedicated listening room I could put the speakers in the center of the room, and then listen from the back.  That would be the biggest imaginable step for solving the bass problem.  That's what Alan, a local audiophile and retired audio engineer, recommended and did in his own system using Magnepans, until his unfortunate passing a few years back.

Also I could move the listening position more to the back of the room.  Even just a few feet back, not all the way back to the loveseat on the far wall from the speakers, would help.  That's where I used to have the listening position until I discovered the power of close up stereo.  Nothing gives the you-are-there feeling like sitting as close as possible to the stereo speakers for the widest possible stereo image and something like stereo-envelopment.

I tried doing that for a few seconds this week, and whatever improvement there might be in the bass, it simply isn't worth losing the you-are-there feeling for it.  Once you've heard the benefits of close up stereo, you don't want to go back to back-of-the-room listening.

In principle I could cover the entire back wall with bass traps, which is about what it would take to meaningfully change the intense room modes.  But I don't have spare space and even if I did I wouldn't have the money.

My pipe dream that I could cancel room modes using FIR remains a pipe dream, and may stay that way.  You can't dynamically shift phase around because that's the same as shifting time back and forth and is known as wow and flutter.

So I'm back to doing more EQ fiddling because it's the only thing I can do.

The chairside digital eq is one of my bigger improvements this year, I still think.  That's what I used earlier to do a small but very useful tweak to the midrange of my system.  And from there I dialed in some mostly subjective but partly objective bass boosts (and a couple extra cuts too).  There is also a dedicated EQ unit for the subwoofer channels, but that's mainly dedicated to cancelling room modes, and even minor changes seem to mess that function up.

And I've long thought about doing a dedicated chairside bass EQ.  Some have wondered why I didn't just optimize the EQ for the listening spot in the first place.  Actually, I have done that, but also very conservatively, because anything but conservative boosts make the stereo unuseable for background listening, which is what I'm doing 95% of the time.

So on Wednesday I tried some fiddling.  It seemed I could add about 2dB boost between 25Hz and 80Hz on the chairside EQ and it added some nice bass "punch" that I'd been hearing everywhere EXCEPT at the listening position with previous adjustments.

Whenever I added boost above 80 Hz, the sound became dull and I immediately wanted to reverse that change.

Also, I removed the 6dB 20Hz cut.  My whole house has a 20Hz resonance, but who cares when you're at the listening position where it self-cancels?

Right now as I'm writing this, I'm playing Royal Scam in the living room and writing in the kitchen.  The bass is definitely over the top, but tolerable on this album.

I saved the new EQ, which was layered on top of more variable boost EQ I dialed in earlier this year, as the new LISTENING eq setting in the chairside EQ.  I plan to have BACKGROUND and MOVIE eq's as well.  The MOVIE EQ would keep the bass in the entire room from getting too excessive, when I'm showing movies for friends.  The periphery of the room has bass about 10dB louder than the listening position as things were already...so my previous ad hoc but obviously inaccurate approach has been to turn down the subs by 10dB at the Dac.

I've thought about controlling the EQ with midi signals, and then even generating the midi from sensors that detect when I'm sitting in the listening chair and perhaps even when the listening chair has been moved out of the way for movies.

It sounds far out, but not unlike what I did in the last two years with stereo automation.  And, it's still easier than trying to deal with the fundamental room problems acoustically, which would probably require making the living room larger and filling the back with bass traps, at vast expense.

I appreciate how James Bongiorno refused to build a preamp without tone controls, then you can deal with all such issues quickly on an ad-hoc basis.  My ultimate dream chairside control unit would have screens that could emulate all sorts of tone controls, EQ sliders, or other classic control systems for easy ad hoc adjustments.  The tone controls would have a window showing the control types (Baxandall, Bongiorno, Holman, etc) and a control for adjusting the turnover frequencies, with the main control for changing adjustment level with full channel matching).  Old analog preamps often had trouble with channel matching, indeed rendering such controls far less useful or even destructive.  But now it can be done perfectly.

But I think ad hoc adjustment is less needed when the specific cases I've mentioned are dealt with.