Was playing around with the equalizer settings and now it sounds horrible. I can get it to sound somewhat decent but was wondering what you stereo guru's set you factory Monsoon equalizer settings to. Thanks for the help.

 

Equalizer settings are all about personal taste. A lot of people go with the oh-so-common smiley face arrangement (high highs, high lows, flat mids), but I think that's a poor way to do it. The best way I've found to adjust an equalizer goes like this:

1. Find a good song you really like that has a wide range of highs lows and mids

2. Put all the equalizer adjustments to flat (right in the middle)

3. Play the song at a moderate volume. Make sure it's loud enough that you can hear the details in the music, but not too loud because you don't want to have distortion when you're making adjustments.

4. Start with any of the EQ sliders. I usually start with the lowest frequencies (the ones on the left).

5. Move that one slider all the way down and then all they way up and then back to the middle. Make sure you hear the difference it is making. Keep moving it up and down until you really get a good feel for what it's changing.

6. Adjust that slider to a point where the sound that's being adjusted sounds the best to you.

7. Move on to the next slider and go back to step 5.

Once you've done this for all of the sliders, you may want to go back through and move each one up and down a little to see if you want to adjust it a little more. You can also try listening to more music and keep fine tuning it. Eventually you should end up with a set of adjustments that are a good compromise for most of the different music you listen to.

Enjoy.

 

the smile worked for most of my songs, that includes rock, jazz, latin, classical, and typical mexican beaner music. . .

 

Thanks guys. I will give both ideas a try and see what happens. Again I appreciate the help.

 

somewhere i ran across several different settings... pop, rock, jazz.... and so on, no sure what i searched under though...

 

I'm not sure what design of filter the eq in our Monsoons is based on, but one thing a lot of people don't realize is that the EQ slider has a certain 'Q' factor that influences how wide the "bell curve" is in terms of what frequency range a slider affects.

In other words, sliding 100Hz up +10dB might have 60Hz also being boosted to say +5dB (same on the other side... eg 140hz getting boosted +5dB as well). Sometimes it might be a tighter curve... 60Hz might just see +2 dB with the +5dB point being closer to 90Hz, by sliding the 100Hz slider (same for the other side of the center frequency).

So the important thing to remember is that the slider is just the 'center' frequency and that there is a bell curve on either side of that center point.

This affects bass response greatly for several reasons:
1) the stock speakers sit in a small cavity. You can get small cavities to get resonant frequencies somewhat low in relation to their sizes through careful port vent designs and damping via absorption, but in general, you're not going to get 25Hz coming out very efficiently out of an F-body stock system. So boosting 60Hz to +10dB might also result in a boost of (wild guess) +5dB to the 40Hz range and maybe +2dB to 30 Hz, etc. These are most likely below the resonant frequency of the woofer and enclosure, so you're going to be pumping signal into those speakers that won't result in audible sound, and if anything the extra speaker cone activity will distort the material that IS audible.

2) some EQ filter designs might actually deliver a "shelf" shape on the low end of the bell curve at the lowest EQ slider, which means you might be boosting stuff below the threshold of reproduction of the speakers and amp (see point 1) almost as much as the center frequency.

For that reason, I've always found that the cleanest bass (and sometimes the strongest, believe it or not) came from keeping the lowest (60HZ?) slider on our monsoons to flat (0db) or slightly below 0 depending on the material (radio can sometimes be bass-heavy).

Surprisingly, a lot of what most listeners consider to be audible bass comes in by tweaking the next slider (120Hz? I really am forgetting a lot about that car lately!). Consider that the lowest string on a 5 string bass comes in around 30-ish Hz I think, so a lot of the higher notes come in closer to 120Hz than what we'd think. Consider the overlap between the bell curves of the two sliders, and you'll see how 120Hz is more important than most people think.

The next range of 3 sliders covers a lot of music and voice and a gentle hand is necessary. In my youth I liked to cut this as much as possible, but as I've grown older I've come to appreciate the subtle details that are audible in that range... reverb, harmonies in vocals, rich electric guitars (distorted or clean - from Sabbath to SRV). I usually keep it around flat with a minor tweak depending on the material. Sometimes I even boost the middle one a very very small amount for some extra presence and richness depending on the music.

I usually drop the next slider (second to last) a very small amount to cut down on what I perceive to be a bit of harshness. This is where it gets personal, in my opinion. Maybe due to years of playing right next to a drum kit as a bassman, but over the years I've come to prefer the sound this way.

The last one is a killer... on radio, with its limited frequency response, I usually crank this one up to close to the limit, but not quite. On CD, forget it... I have to drop it down a bit, usually just above center. Tape usually needs a boost here as well. Again, it's personal.

This setup usually allows for quite loud volumes as required, without overloading the system with too much low end that never really comes out clear enough to hear anyway. As mentioned above, flat is an excellent place to start when determining what suits your taste, maybe even trying to find your favourite volume level first and then trimming down the stuff that seems a bit too much for your taste.