I know this not directly ardour related but I’m regards to studio monitors, I know they sound different in room to room and was wondering if ardour comes with a linear phase eq because I wanted to play pink noise and use an audio analyzer on my phone and adjust the eq curve and put that eq on the processor section so it’s running in the background. I know there is room correction software but I don’t have the money and desire that option at this time.
Just a heads up, this can be very dangerous. Not in terms of ‘you are endangering someone or equipment’ but in terms of ‘If you aren’t careful you will do more harm than good’.
First and foremost before doing this, you should be addressing acoustics of your room. An EQ won’t fix acoustical problems, it may just hide it at best. The second thing is that running a simple RTA will not answer if something is a phase problem or a magnitude problem. The latter can be addressed with EQ, the former you cannot.
It also doesn’t really answer how accurate the microphone on your phone is, which is needed to be a flat response to really benefit from this. There are fairly cheap microphones designed to work with specific RTAs, and some even come with correction curves to help address shortcomings here, but in general I don’t depend on a phone microphone for anything like this.
Finally keep in mind you will only measure precisely where the microphone is. This goes back to the acoustics thing, if you are in the null of a frequency in a room you might end up falsely boosting significant frequencies that don’t need to be boosted as much. Again acoustics can really screw with things and needs to be addressed first.
None of the above is to say you shouldn’t ever do it, but that you should know what you are doing before you attempt it, and realize the limitations of the technology you are describing.
Now to answer your question, no I do not believe it is (But am not 100% certain). And in fact IIRC you can even see the phase response of the EQ by analyzing it in Ardour.
Seablade
^^^ spends a lot of time tuning sound systems from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands of dollars and more
3 Likes
I understand, I guess I’ll make sure to treat my room the best I can as well as adjust the HF and LF settings I have at the back of my monitors
That is definitely the best first step. After that tuning for the room can help some, but in many cases isn’t ideal.
Again I am not saying don’t tune, I am just saying be careful when you do to make sure you are in fact improving. In the end your ears are your most valuable tool and make sure to check with them afterwards. Remember that the goal isn’t to create a pleasant sound, but an accurate one, and you may find, especially in a treated room, that you hear the phase problems of the EQ (Even linear EQs have slight phase shifts) as much as you do the improvements.
SeabladeTo answer the original topic question: No, a-eq is a minimum phase EQ.
You can also test for yourself, Ardour’s plugin-analysis tool has a “Show phase” checkbox. For a linear phase EQ the red line (the phase response) would be flat at 0 deg.
As for your application question, +1 to @seablade 's comments.
2 Likes
What does the phase do to the sound again, also I heard about ministry phase having a pre ringing sound, and I read online to reduce it is to have a a we curve boosted and another eq cut in the sane area to reduce the ringing sound
Short version, worsens (Generally).
Ok you may have to try retyping that or redescribing that. What I think I am reading is wrong, but I am honestly unsure of exactly what you are trying to say.
Short version: phase problems can lead to a hollow, almost ringing sound at frequencies dependent on the slope and frequency of the filter, but doing a boost and cut in the same area with most EQs will not ‘fix’ phase issues. In fact with many EQs it will only make it much worse, and in fact all you might be left with is the phase issues with no real benefit from the boost/cut if they are equal in magnitude, frequency and bandwidth.
Honestly it doesn’t sound like you are yet sure of what phase is precisely, only that you have been told it is bad.
As an experiment, take a music track (Preferably full frequency range material) you know very well. Put it in Ardour, on two seperate tracks, and use isolated solo to allow you to quickly switch between those tracks. On one track put a CALF eq. On the other track put the a-eq. Set the bandwidth, frequency, and gain equal, on one band between the two eqs. Solo between the tracks and see if you hear a difference. Then add a second filter on both in, again matching between the two EQs and again solo between the tracks. You are likely to start hearing the difference if you didn’t hear it to start with, and that difference in that case has a lot to do with the poor phase response of the CALF EQs. Start using exercises like this to train your ears to hear the phase problems.
Once you can hear the phase problems, then you can start worrying about fixing them (Short version, you fix them for your monitors by addressing reflections in your room, you generally don’t fix them easily in the mix, you try not to have them to start with by using processing that avoids it).
Seablade
1 Like
Does the x42 have good phases response, I did really like the calf plugins but I have found out their performance is not good. Linux is great but I am not sure which plugins are good quality and not, I also use to use eq10q but I’m not sure if they are just as bad as calf eq or worse
I’ll take a look into the phase thing,
Hello, does somebody know a good linear-phase eq for linux? i’ve been looking for one unsuccessfully…
Since it’s created with JUCE it would be mostly straight forward to provide Linux versions, but the plugin is only available for Windows and Mac. If you limit yourself to those platforms, there is a wide variety of linear-phase EQs available.
This topic was automatically closed 91 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.