Does EQ Correction Improve Accuracy in Microphone Recordings with Elevated High Frequencies?

[FCAP]

Most microphones are not perfectly flat and tend to have a rise in the high-frequency range. If a recording is made with a microphone that boosts high frequencies, can using EQ to reduce that boost make the recording closer to the original sound? And would this kind of EQ adjustment also make music sound better when played back through loudspeakers?

Thank you all for your help.

Neumann U 47​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neumann_U_47


RODE NT1

RODE NT1 - microphone.wiki

microphone.wiki

 

[gwing]

Yes, that would be a sort of homebrew equivalent to using a measurement mike with it's calibration curve and may well produce a more true and flat recording.

However part of the art of a recording engineer is producing not a flat response but one designed to 'sound better' for the type of replay system and location anticipated by that sound engineer. Whether your flattened recording sound better to your ears or not is a subjective thing you'll have to test but beware - if your recording curve with eq is substantially different to most of the commercial recordings you may have to have two sets of eq for replay on your system and switch between them when when listening to your own or commercial recordings.

 

[Philbo King]

It's always better to record flat and EQ (if needed) later, based on my 50 years experience in recording. But the EQ police likely won't burst in and arrest you if you do.

 

[DVDdoug]

Most pro studio microphones are NOT flat and recording engineers rarely want flat. The big pro studios have a '"mic locker" with lots of mics to choose from. Those famous old microphones are cherished for their sound and other manufacturers frequently try to copy it. If Frank Sinatra used it and won grammies... that must be the secret!

There are modeling mics that attempt to duplicate the sound of several mics, or Antares MIc Mod also attempts to make one mic sound like another (as long as they are both in their database).

Of course recording engineers and mixing/mastering engineers use EQ too (by ear). It's a creative process and they aren't normally looking for "accuracy". On the playback side we usually want our setup to be capable of accurately reproducing their production. And from there we may want to make our own tweaks, especially on recordings that don't sound quite right to us...

Measurement mics are rarely used for recording and a couple of reasons for that are that they are usually omnidirectional (so they pick-up unwanted noise from all directions) and they are usually small-diaphragm mics (for high-frequency response) and that tends to give it a worse signal-to-noise ratio.

 

[Nopiano]

I think your answer depends whether you believe the engineering was intended to make the recording close to the original sound, or whether it was adjusted to sound ‘good’. Given the number of stages through which any commercial recording is typically passed before we get to hear it, I think the subtleties of an individual mic are long lost!

Welcome to ASR!

 

[kemmler3D]

As others have said, engineers may choose to EQ against the mic's natural frequency response to get a flatter output if the job calls for it.

However, trying to fix a mic's frequency response at home on your system is not a good idea, as the recording / mixing / mastering engineers will have already applied EQ to get the desired sound. Plenty of EQ is already "baked into" most recordings.

Even if you disagree with how the recording sounds, trying to EQ a recording to fix the frequency response of a given microphone won't work, since 1) EQ will have already been applied to an unknown extent, so correcting the stock frequency response is likely to over-correct, 2) various instruments were probably recorded with various mics, each with its own frequency response, so correcting for mic X will make the baked-in response of mic Y on the recording worse.

So, trying to correct an individual mic in a mixed recording isn't usually possible, even if you happen to know which mic was used.

 

[DVDdoug]

Here's a quote I saved:

We said we wanted to try for a Grammy, we also said we didn't want to use any EQ. That lasted about 8 hours.

Ken Caillat, Engineer on Fleetwood Mac's Rumor Album

 

[FCAP]

Most pro studio microphones are NOT flat and recording engineers rarely want flat. The big pro studios have a '"mic locker" with lots of mics to choose from. Those famous old microphones are cherished for their sound and other manufacturers frequently try to copy it. If Frank Sinatra used it and won grammies... that must be the secret!

There are modeling mics that attempt to duplicate the sound of several mics, or Antares MIc Mod also attempts to make one mic sound like another (as long as they are both in their database).

Of course recording engineers and mixing/mastering engineers use EQ too (by ear). It's a creative process and they aren't normally looking for "accuracy". On the playback side we usually want our setup to be capable of accurately reproducing their production. And from there we may want to make our own tweaks, especially on recordings that don't sound quite right to us...

Measurement mics are rarely used for recording and a couple of reasons for that are that they are usually omnidirectional (so they pick-up unwanted noise from all directions) and they are usually small-diaphragm mics (for high-frequency response) and that tends to give it a worse signal-to-noise ratio.

That makes sense now. I really appreciate your patience in explaining this.

 

[FCAP]

Yes, that would be a sort of homebrew equivalent to using a measurement mike with it's calibration curve and may well produce a more true and flat recording.

However part of the art of a recording engineer is producing not a flat response but one designed to 'sound better' for the type of replay system and location anticipated by that sound engineer. Whether your flattened recording sound better to your ears or not is a subjective thing you'll have to test but beware - if your recording curve with eq is substantially different to most of the commercial recordings you may have to have two sets of eq for replay on your system and switch between them when when listening to your own or commercial recordings.

That makes sense now. I really appreciate your patience in explaining this.

 

[FCAP]

Yes, that would be a sort of homebrew equivalent to using a measurement mike with it's calibration curve and may well produce a more true and flat recording.

However part of the art of a recording engineer is producing not a flat response but one designed to 'sound better' for the type of replay system and location anticipated by that sound engineer. Whether your flattened recording sound better to your ears or not is a subjective thing you'll have to test but beware - if your recording curve with eq is substantially different to most of the commercial recordings you may have to have two sets of eq for replay on your system and switch between them when when listening to your own or commercial recordings.

Thanks so much for getting back to me.

 

[FCAP]

I think your answer depends whether you believe the engineering was intended to make the recording close to the original sound, or whether it was adjusted to sound ‘good’. Given the number of stages through which any commercial recording is typically passed before we get to hear it, I think the subtleties of an individual mic are long lost!

Welcome to ASR!

Thanks so much for getting back to me.Thank you for the warm welcome.

 

[FCAP]

As others have said, engineers may choose to EQ against the mic's natural frequency response to get a flatter output if the job calls for it.

However, trying to fix a mic's frequency response at home on your system is not a good idea, as the recording / mixing / mastering engineers will have already applied EQ to get the desired sound. Plenty of EQ is already "baked into" most recordings.

Even if you disagree with how the recording sounds, trying to EQ a recording to fix the frequency response of a given microphone won't work, since 1) EQ will have already been applied to an unknown extent, so correcting the stock frequency response is likely to over-correct, 2) various instruments were probably recorded with various mics, each with its own frequency response, so correcting for mic X will make the baked-in response of mic Y on the recording worse.

So, trying to correct an individual mic in a mixed recording isn't usually possible, even if you happen to know which mic was used.

As others have said, engineers may choose to EQ against the mic's natural frequency response to get a flatter output if the job calls for it.

However, trying to fix a mic's frequency response at home on your system is not a good idea, as the recording / mixing / mastering engineers will have already applied EQ to get the desired sound. Plenty of EQ is already "baked into" most recordings.

Even if you disagree with how the recording sounds, trying to EQ a recording to fix the frequency response of a given microphone won't work, since 1) EQ will have already been applied to an unknown extent, so correcting the stock frequency response is likely to over-correct, 2) various instruments were probably recorded with various mics, each with its own frequency response, so correcting for mic X will make the baked-in response of mic Y on the recording worse.

So, trying to correct an individual mic in a mixed recording isn't usually possible, even if you happen to know which mic was used.

Your reply was very professional—thanks for the explanation. I was also genuinely curious whether using EQ to tune a speaker system can actually improve the accuracy of recordings.

 

[kemmler3D]

I was also genuinely curious whether using EQ to tune a speaker system can actually improve the accuracy of recordings.

Yes and no. Being very literal and pedantic here, Using EQ for room / speaker correction will give you an audible result that is closer to the recording in a sense, but the recording itself does not become more accurate compared to some other reference point.

Or in other words, the recording doesn't get more accurate, your system does. A recording is what it is, there isn't an ideal reference point that the listener can drive a recording towards, any more than you can make an oil painting "more accurate".

What we can do is EQ or otherwise tune our systems to correct deviation from the original recording.

Probably I am simply missing your point so I can make an obvious one of my own, but hopefully this makes sense.

e: There is also a valid concept around correcting the tonality of a recording when it's far out of whack with your preferences. If you are listening to a record and you think to yourself "wow, no bass" or "this sounds muffled" you can use EQ to add the missing bass or treble. This isn't really considered more or less "accurate" but just a way to manage your listening experience - similar to turning up the brightness when you find a movie looks way too dark on your TV. It's also separate from correcting your speakers or room.

 

[ThatSoundsGood]

A flat frequency response microphone doesn't necessarily reproduce a recorded sound the same way that you would hear it in the room. High frequency boost in microphones is often necessary to hear the recorded instrument or voice the same way you would hear it in person. I would not apply the rules that we use for hifi or monitoring speakers to microphone frequency response. It's two different worlds.

 

[Mnyb]

Microphones are not ears and their characteristics on how they pick up sound ( thier polar plot ) varies and ears also have our brain to filter our perception . So position and distance to the sound makes it sound different. This fact is used by the recording engineer why migth place the microphones differently acording to the production needs ? An acoustic recording migth have several mics picking up the same sound ! Some main stereo pair some close to a soloist or other instrument and some for ambience in the concert hall ?

Variation is endless, sound engineers producers and musicians might then listen to the takes and introduce for example EQ or compression and various level changes to blend the different tracks to something artistically ”rigth” for the production.

If some recording sound rigth to you it might be the craft of the production you hear rather then the microphone

I bet that most things does not sound ”rigth” if you just plonk a random microphone in front of the sound source .
Instruments migth not produce the same sound in every direction ? Combine that with the mics polar and varying the position versus the instrument can be a creative tool.

I’m not a recording engineer, so I can’t explain exactly the various techniques used to make stereo recordings sounds ”stereo” there are 2 mic recordings of whole performances and there several established placement schemes that are popular and gives different results.

 

[ThatSoundsGood]

Microphones are not ears and their characteristics on how they pick up sound ( thier polar plot ) varies and ears also have our brain to filter our perception . So position and distance to the sound makes it sound different. This fact is used by the recording engineer why migth place the microphones differently acording to the production needs ? An acoustic recording migth have several mics picking up the same sound ! Some main stereo pair some close to a soloist or other instrument and some for ambience in the concert hall ?

Emphasis here on the proximity effect of the microphone. For the most part, all microphones pick up the sound differently depending on how close they are to the source. The frequency response completely changes.

Variation is endless, sound engineers producers and musicians might then listen to the takes and introduce for example EQ or compression and various level changes to blend the different tracks to something artistically ”rigth” for the production.

If some recording sound rigth to you it might be the craft of the production you hear rather then the microphone

I bet that most things does not sound ”rigth” if you just plonk a random microphone in front of the sound source .
Instruments migth not produce the same sound in every direction ? Combine that with the mics polar and varying the position versus the instrument can be a creative tool.

I’m not a recording engineer, so I can’t explain exactly the various techniques used to make stereo recordings sounds ”stereo” there are 2 mic recordings of whole performances and there several established placement schemes that are popular and gives different results.

Well said with all of this.