Like, if you take away 4db “from treble”, should that be distributed roughly amongst bass and mid or solely either if you want it to be heavy for that range?
Is it like an equation that benefits from balancing it out?
Like, if you take away 4db “from treble”, should that be distributed roughly amongst bass and mid or solely either if you want it to be heavy for that range?
Is it like an equation that benefits from balancing it out?
An equalizer does not have to sum up to any specific number. Each frequency range is basically being amplified or attenuated individually. You are boosting or reducing specific frequency ranges. If you reduce them all equally, then the end result is that your song is lower volume. If you boost them all, your song is louder.
Of note: boosting songs may cause occasional crackling sounds. If this is the case it is because the boosting is clipping the top end of the amplitude of your signal at various frequencies. So boost moderately. You are better off reducing some frequencies and leaving the rest normal and increase the volume of the source to compensate whenever possible.
Yeah, that last paragraph is important. I’m a professional audio technician, and way too many people will begin with boosts instead of cuts. But cutting is much easier on a technical level, because you’re just lowering the volume of something. Boosting is much more technically complicated, because you’re “adding” signal that doesn’t already exist. So you have to make that signal from something, and that’s much more technically difficult than simply turning the volume down.
Imagine you have a signal coming in at a baseline of 0dB. Cutting 6dB is easy, because you simply let less of the signal pass. But if you want to turn it up 6dB, you need to “create” that 6dB from somewhere, because it doesn’t already exist. You can’t just “turn it up” because it’s already turned all the way up at 0dB.