What is your favorite house curve

[mhardy6647]

I-280 is (or at least was, in the '80s and 90s) one of my favorite stretches of road in Amurrica.
I am also quite partial to I-89, 91, and 93 here in northern New England (not I-93 south of ca. Manchester, NH).

 

[Doodski]

This one or the other one?

U.S. Route 91 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Interstate 91 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

...and #93. With all the architecture in Boston that I've read about.

Interstate 93 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

and I-89.

Interstate 89 - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

It's wonderful that those links brings up the highway signage too.

 

[mhardy6647]

Interstates. Sorry.
I was looking for a photo I took from the I-89 northbound rest area near Grantham NH (not far from here) back when we were still coming up from MA on weekends... can't find it at the moment, though.

 

[Doodski]

Interstates. Sorry.
I was looking for a photo I took from the I-89 northbound rest area near Grantham NH (not far from here) back when we were still coming up from MA on weekends... can't find it at the moment, though.

If you are anything like me when I skim and scan and I look right at the thumbnail and don't see it...LoL.

 

[mhardy6647]

If you are anything like me when I skim and scan and I look right at the thumbnail and don't see it...LoL.

Never.

 

[mhardy6647]

I really shouldn't try to be facetious.
I skipped to the earliest photos I uploaded to Flickr, and found it on the second page (i.e., next to earliest uploads). Derp.


(photo taken in Oct. 2013... ten freaking years ago)
This gives a sense of the area. Our daughter & family live just a couple of miles from this spot.



In fact, it is (barely) visible from their house, due to the nature of the terrain. You'll have to take my word for it.

 

[Doodski]

Never.

I developed a proprietary organizing system for images. I add the letter Z to the beginning of any file name that I want easily found and fast too and then the more important it is I label it with more Z letters. Like if more important it will look something like this, [zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz image 3102.png]. So they always appear at the bottom...LoL. Veryy technical but effective. I use it often and then I can easily mop up when deleting those Z images that are all at the bottom. etc etc.

 

[Doodski]

I really shouldn't try to be facetious.
I skipped to the earliest photos I uploaded to Flickr, and found it on the second page (i.e., next to earliest uploads). Derp.


(photo taken in Oct. 2013... ten freaking years ago)
This gives a sense of the area. Our daughter & family live just a couple of miles from this spot.



In fact, it is (barely) visible from their house, due to the nature of the terrain. You'll have to take my word for it.

I can picture those places in my mind and then I look for mountains and see none and then I look and see rolling hills and not prairie and then after none of them are familiar. LoL. It looks like a wonderful place to find lots of wild animals and some peace and quiet. Being from a mountainous area for most of my life when I moved to the prairies I had headaches for two or three years after and I finally arrived at a solution which is to wear a baseball hat for eye protection from the vast sky. You too have a vast wide open sky that is really cool.

 

[CleanSound]

My speakers are essentially neutral and my room is treated. I haven't done a measurement of in room response yet (I have some logistical challenges with my listening space at the moment, so hopefully soon I can use REW to measure my room and make the treatment adjustments as needed.).

Having said that, I don't EQ because when I do, I find myself EQing each track as some EQ settings works for some tracks and not for others.

I personally hate the idea "as the artist intended," if there are audio engineers here, this statement might get you worked up, but I really don't give a damn: maybe sometimes the artists' and audio engineers' intention just plain out SUCKS? And yes, I am allowed to say this with zero mixing and mastering experience and never have played an instrument or performed.

 

[Hayabusa]

My speakers are essentially neutral and my room is treated. I haven't done a measurement of in room response yet (I have some logistical challenges with my listening space at the moment, so hopefully soon I can use REW to measure my room and make the treatment adjustments as needed.).

Having said that, I don't EQ because when I do, I find myself EQing each track as some EQ settings works for some tracks and not for others.

I personally hate the idea "as the artist intended," if there are audio engineers here, this statement might get you worked up, but I really don't give a damn: maybe sometimes the artists' and audio engineers' intention just plain out SUCKS? And yes, I am allowed to say this with zero mixing and mastering experience and never have played an instrument or performed.

Do the REW measurement indeed, it will tell you if your speakers are indeed 'neutral' in your room

 

[CleanSound]

Do the REW measurement indeed, it will tell you if your speakers are indeed 'neutral' in your room

100%

I have a chimney issue and waiting to get it repaired. Once it's repaired, I will set my listening room up again and do some REW measurements.

Interestingly, according to one of Erin's videos he is saying, the in room response shouldn't be flat to mimic an anechoic chamber. He is saying it should trend downward as you get higher in frequency. I know there is a thread on this topic on ASR, which I will read later.

 

[tmtomh]

This is the target curve I used in REW for my Von Schweikert VR5 Anniversary Speakers:
View attachment 297789

Martin

Thanks for this! This brings up a question that's been on my mind for a while:

@Martin 's curve here looks a lot like target curves that are available online, and a lot like target curves that are created in Dirac and GLM by adjusting the low and high shelf filters that are used to set target curves. Namely, the curve does not slope down linearly from 20Hz-20kHz. Instead, the bass is mostly constant up to 60Hz, then slopes downward in a gentle curve from 60-200Hz, then is flat or has a very, very gentle linear slope from 200Hz to about 6kHz give or take, and then a slightly more downward slope out to 20kHz.

But other target curves - ones that look a lot like the "predicted in-room response" for well-designed speakers that measure flat anechoic - are more of a downward-sloping straight line all the way from 20Hz to 20kHz. They don't have the "curviness" of the other type of target curve - the degree/angle of slope doesn't really vary as it does with the first type of curve.

I would love to know folks' thoughts on these two different types of approach to an overall downward-sloping target curve. My intuition says that the more linear/constant-angle downward slope should sound the best, but my experience is that a curve similar to Martin's sounds more "right" in practice.

Grateful as always for insights and perspective.

 

[Hayabusa]

100%

I have a chimney issue and waiting to get it repaired. Once it's repaired, I will set my listening room up again and do some REW measurements.

Interestingly, according to one of Erin's videos he is saying, the in room response shouldn't be flat to mimic an anechoic chamber. He is saying it should trend downward as you get higher in frequency. I know there is a thread on this topic on ASR, which I will read later.

Yes, most will setup a downward slope of around 1dB/oct

 

[Rednaxela]

I know there is a thread on this topic on ASR, which I will read later.

Post #21 may be a good starting point.

 

[peng]

Do the REW measurement indeed, it will tell you if your speakers are indeed 'neutral' in your room

As usual, I would say it depends. If you plot a single FR from one mic position, that it may not tell, but if you measure like the way Amir does on ASR, then I am sure it will tell you if the speakers are neutral in your room, or at least close to being neutral. Then again, it also depends on how you define neutral, that may also be slightly controversial..

 

[Steve81]

I generally prefer a 4-5dB boost, but it rather depends on the content, how loudly I’m watching, etc.

 

[Thomas_A]

I don't really know what a favourite curve is.

I correct for a few peaks below 100 Hz; the rest is what it is.

 

[Acerun]

I generally prefer a 4-5dB boost, but it rather depends on the content, how loudly I’m watching, etc.

I too have found 4db to be the magic number. -0.1 tilt then +3 db low shelf at 100. With two big subs, I just leave them flat and I have plenty of bass and sub bass.

 

[dualazmak]

The latest "standard and default" best tuned total Fq response of room air sound measured at my listening position by the "cumulative white noise averaging method"; please refer here on my project thread for the details of the latest system setup as of August 3 2023.

 

[onununo]

I find it odd that the tonal balance of my plain KH310 monitors is rather "dark" in my rather reflecting room, being it opposed to the rather "bright" tonal balance that my hi fi speakers (to name them: sonus faber concertino and elac adante) instead express.
Taken for granted that the neumanns exhibit a flat FR in anechoic conditions, and that the FR of the 2 hi-fi speakers should not be so far away from it (at least in terms of overall slope), I'm left with blaming a very different directivity of the monitors for such a substantial tonal difference.
As much as the timbre of the monitors is way more accurate than the timbre of the other 2 speakers (confirming the much higher smoothness and flatness of their anechoic FR and their better controlled directivity), I find the tonal balance ot the hi-fi speakers to be the correct one, if not just a little too bright, whereas the monitors sound definely too much on the dark side.
The point is, that I have spent countless hours trying to find a proper EQ and "house curve" to apply to the combo consisting of the monitors + their KH750 subs using Equalizer APO, based on countless measurements done with REW and calibrated mic, to no avail. Anything I do to improve the overall tonal balance seems to spoil the timbrical precision.
In the end, I surrended and let the dedicated "MA-1" neumann monitor calibration suite do the job, and don't ask me why (because I can't figure it out), it manages to do in a breeze what I couldn't achieve after months of testing and trials using REW.
So, my take off is that there must a way to properly eq speakers to get both a tonally and a timbrically balanced response (read: all intruments sound like they should, and I don't feel the need to touch the tone controls from track to track, form music to speech/movies, etc. - everything I throw at the speakers now seems to sound just right, included badly recorded material). And it must not be so difficult if it can be done automatically by a software algorithm. I mean: MA-1 found the correct tonal balance immediately, it did not preceed by trial and error, or by "taste". It proposed a very simple "house curve", and that was exactly the correct one, at first try.
So, what is that MA-1 does so well, that I cannot get manually even after months of measurements and infinite trials with REW and a generic parametric equalizer? To me this is still a mystery.