Uhoh. DEQ failed

 Paradise had arrived.  With my chairside Behringer 2496 DEQ I could instantly flip from Background to Listening Position optimized EQ's.  I also memorized the typical level so in most cases I didn't even have to re-adjust the level, which was also fairly convenient with the chairside DEQ.

But then work on my house led to power glitches and a restart of the UPS which powers most DEQ's.  (I think I had plugged the chairside EQ straight into house power, which would have been a mistake.)  The chairside DEQ had a sudden death (flashing screen) before I remembered to even take a picture of the new EQ settings.

I created a thread on DIYAudio and quickly figured out there is a faulty C17 capacitor in the power supply, and the "big capacitor" looks iffy so I plan to replace that too.  The biggest issue for me is it's ROHS lead free solder, and I don't have any and have never worked with it before.  My usual methods with leaded solder didn't permit me to remove C17 as I was expecting.  I bought new solder, a new powered solder sucker,  I will need to practice with the lead free solder first so I don't mess up the Behringer.  Oh I forgot I need to get a new tip for my Hakko iron too, it's better to have a different tip for leaded and unleaded.  Some say you should just stick with leaded, crank it up to deal with the lead free solder.

If I mess up that one, I'll have to borrow and fix another PS from another unit maybe, so I can "recover" the magic lost settings.

Meanwhile, I've programmed in my best conservative approximation of what I had before in the midrange and bass DEQ's.

For the Bass, the "No Remote Background" setting has -6dB for 20Hz, and +4.5 for 25 and 32 Hz.  The "No Remote Listening" setting has 0dB for 20Hz and +6.5dB for 25 and 32 Hz.  This is a pretty good approximation of what I had before except there was some additional boosting higher.  Judging by RTA now, that's tricky, so I might wait until I recover the lost settings in my old DEQ.  (According to an entry below, I had boosted about 2dB from 25-80 Hz...but that was layered on top of an existing pattern of boosts and cuts in that range I'd worked out between July and October.)

For the midrange, I had some penultimate settings dialed in already as J3 in the midrange DEQ.  The midrange boost was already permanently dialed in through a PEQ setting, but I had also done some fine tuning of the midbass and lower midrange.  Sometime around then I decided to "move" all boost settings into the chairside EQ, so in the J3 settings these fine tunings are bypassed in the bypass menu.  To restore them into the new No Remote settings, I simply removed the bypassing.  I most likely did some further fine tuning in the chairside EQ after July 3, but it may take some time to figure out what works and I may just wait until the old settings are recovered.  At least the July 3 GEQ settings seem to measure and sound pretty well.  In fact I had several hours of Audio ecstasy on Sunday as my mplay playlist generator running the Albums script had selected Cowboy Junkies, and Rebecca Pigeon albums which I heard as never before.

Sadly mplay was unable to make another Albums playlist because the altTunes folder it uses was already played out and needed to be reset, and it appears modifications in the mplay program in the last few months caused the reset to stop working again.  So I furiously debugged that on Monday morning and got it fixed.  Meanwhile I've been listing to background music using the Music script (which really means Background Music...and it's also albums, just music with no words), which had been my usual until a week or two ago.

I'm creating an all new program tplay to reset the mplay history whenever playlists are not played to the very end.  That has been a big problem for me with picture and movie playlists, not so much music playlists as Roon conveniently halts streaming when the Oppo is turned off.  But it's not a non-problem for audio either, because Roon inconveniently doesn't remember where it was when you go back to a playlist when you've stopped it temporarily to play something else.

I also have been working on splay to shuffle playlists together in various ways, and have added a -new option to mplay to select files only from the last specified number of days.  With these commands, a a playlist of all new files can be shuffled together with a playlist of pre-existing files.