Hey guys,
Since I got my new laptop, I've been messing with the EQ settings and trying to find the best settings for predominatley death and black metal since my external speakers I've plugged into the laptop aren't exactly the greatest.

I've come to this and it sounds pretty good, currently blasting Immortal's At The Heart Of Winter but it still sounds like it maybe missing something else.



Does anyone have any better settings that they could share?

I've been using this set-up. It was a pre-set made for labtops speakers and headphones in a program I used to use. It originally had 10 and the one that is missing is 31 in your pic. It is supposed to be the same as the two farthest to the right I think.

Equalizers depend on both the recording and the speakers. Find a reference recording - something that you know how it should sound - then EQ the speakers so that sounds right. Save that as a preset, then tweak it from there to find what sounds best. Some recordings require different EQing on different speakers if certain ranges are dominant.

Not sure if this thread will last but I'll give my contribution.

EQ settings depend on a myriad of things. Your DAC, your speakers, the room you're in, the music you're playing. Those are probably the most important. I once changed a CD rack (2m tall wooden tower) out of place and I had a different sound altogether because of the change in reverb. All of this to say that there are no definitive EQ settings. All of those factors aside there's also something which I like to call "personal flavour", which means that different people will prefer different EQ settings.

That's all I can say about this really, hope it helps somehow.

Cranking up the highs a little is usually good no matter what.

I wish I had a definitive answer for you, bud. However, I have completely different settings in my car than I do on my laptop (which are different for the settings I had in my old car and on my old laptop and on my parents' desktop). There may be a certain area that you want to raise (I heard you want to raise the mids for thrash, but who knows if there's any legitimacy to that). Sorry I can't be more help

I long stopped using EQ completely. Usually it's best to have the music unchanged from what it was originally supposed to sound like. Quality speakers and a good sound card should make EQs more or less unnessecary. Even if the aim is to improve on bad mixing I don't recommend it. Listening to music with poor production trains the ear.

Prior to that though I would have recommended this equalizer setting any day for any kind of music.

Weird EQ setting there.

Anyway, EQ can be used to bypass some specific situations without "changing" the way the music is supposed to sound. In my case I use it to remove some of the boom on my speakers, which despite having a good dynamic range are still boomy as every PC speaker in the world. I should also mention that there's a "golden rule" when it comes to using an EQ, and that is that you should always cut frequencies instead of boosting them with the difference in gain never going over 6dBs. The less you touch it the best it sounds.

There are some interesting guides for what each frequency does and what can be changed by cutting or boosting here and there. Just google "EQ settings" or "EQ guide" and you'll find plenty of knowledge.

Yeah well, we don't know what your speakers sound like.

If you're EQing purely for listening enjoyment, then the best settings are the the ones that sound best to YOU. Either keep toying around until you find something that you like, or better yet, don't bother and get used to listening to shit as is. Everything else here is irrelevant.

o0n my ipod it has pre made eqs and for tech death i find the jazz setting to work wonders on making each instrument stand out a little more. other than that i usually dont mess with them at all and leave it on normal.

Everything is mixed and mastered differently so no matter how you EQ your computer some things will sound great and others won't.
My advice is to get a really big subwoofer and keep everything else zeroed.

I just leave it the way it is. Different mixes/producers and what not.

Not unless they had your exact sound system, exact room configuration, listened to the exact same stuff and had the same ears as yours.

All you're doing is altering the original mix. If you want to hear it the way it was supposed to sound, you should be listening on reference monitors with no EQ. If you're using commercial speakers, see if you can find a graph of the frequency response and counter any attenuation/boost in level.

Just out of curiosity, what is weird about it? That's a typical mid-scoop setting I've seen used hundreds of times.

It has the low end boosted, the mid-range cut and the high end boosted. What's weird about it? Pretty much it being a U curve when it should be as flat as possible.

I don't understand people who want to scoop out the mids.

The mid-range can be cut slightly to provide for extra "clarity" on the guitars and remove some of the muddy sound and overuse of distortion. It's not uncommon to cut it slightly, and by slightly I mean 0.5dB or even less.

I just leave the shit in the middle. I hate messing around with the eq.

Plain eq and good speakers/headphones. Those 'V' settings sucks when you realize that the apparent 'extra heaviness' is nothing but a muddy low vibration which bury the guitars and vocals and oddly enhance the cymbals. Too many details are lost with that setting, the definition of the notes is placed between the 400hz and 1k, the very same frequencies diminished to death.

Jazz preset is typically good for bringing out the bass.

once you fine tune your eq for the speakers chuck some headphones on and see how different it is
we had a spare mattress in a room at my old place leaning against the wall, one day family stayed over and we moved it, that made my stereo sound like total shit

cool hearing test [be careful with it!]
http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jw/hearing.html

i use queen's invisible man for setting stuff up here, it has a bit of everything [no black metal shrieks though...]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKdxd718WXg

oh and i have a flat eq for everything...

Why are we even bothering to talk about EQ when you are running a computer instead of an amp? Four fifths less shit is still going to sound pretty shitty.

It's probably a bit OT, (and boerderline grumpy old man/get off my lawn), but when I was looking at setting up my first stereo setup I was chasing down 2nd hand 70's/80's hi-fi amps, speakers and turntables from garage sales and pawn shops. Why the fuck are we taking about "eq-ing your computer"? A computer does computing, a stereo does sound, and unless you are running a pro-tools rig with monitors, why are you confusing the two things?

It occurs to me that the reason people are happy with poorly encoded mp3 rips of albums these days is that they have never owned a setup good enough to be able to tell the difference.

It certainly isn't on already-shrill laptop speakers! Then again, although I'm no audiophile, I certainly can't stand listening to much music through laptop speakers.

Not the case with the OP but you should know that there are some DACs on PC sound cards that give a better output than most mid-range priced stereos in the market.

I'd dispute that. Firstly, what are you defining as "mid-priced"? The market is so fragmented that you have everything from ipod docks to hand-made gear that looks like it should be powering a steampunk spaceship. If you define mid-price as one or two hundred, well, perhaps. Buying new, decent amps start at around the $400 mark. A lot of manufacturors make some really great entry level gear these days (NAD for example). But second hand, you open up a whole realm of possibility. On that level, "mid priced" buys a hell of a lot of bang for the buck - you are looking at being able to buy 80's-90's Denon, Rotel, Sansui, Sharp etc solid state stuff with decent phono-in channels. I would honestly say that there is no hope in hell that any soundcard under the $500 level (ie where you start looking at semi-pro cards aimed at recording) are going to beat what you can get out of an old hi-fi amp that, if you are patient and look around, you can pick up for around $200.

And then we start talking about speakers. Can you honestly tell me that you know people who have a nice pair of even bookshelf speakers that they run straight out of a laptop?

I had a real eye-opener about this stuff in the last 6 months. I picked up a NAD (nice British audio company) CD player recently. Retailed for $1000 plus about 7 years ago, sold on ebay for $60. the difference between playing CD's through the PC and playing through that is phenomonal. Similarly, I used to use a Sherwood (not a bad brand, but not fantastic) home theatre reciever as my amp. No phono chanel and not that great. A bit of looking around over maybe 6 weeks saw me pick up a Denon AVR-900 amp for $150, and it completely smokes the old unit.

My point being that there will probably never be a better time to pick up good quality hi-fi gear cheap than now. So many idiots are getting rid of their own or their deceased relatives top-notch gear because because they have switched to ipods/docks and cant tell the difference. If you spend more than $60-ish per month on music, its a wasted investment to listen to it on rinky-dink laptop speakers. You may as well stick with youtube.

For a moment I thought this was going to turn into one of those "analog vs digital" arguments but I see that you have your facts straight.

I'm not disputing that you can get some sweet deals on second-handed material, but as you say it yourself that material isn't located on a "mid-price" range when new. It's high-fidelity gear that one can get for "mid-price" after a few years and with a bit of patience. Totally agree with you. What I meant was that there are audio cards that are able to give a beating to most hi-fi and surround systems that you'd buy new in the "mid-price" range. Take Asus Xonar series, which I know perfectly well since I've done a ton of reading and I actually own one. If connected to decent speakers it has an output capacity that is very very good. Be it on speakers, headphones or surround systems. Of course you'd have to pair it with a decent set of speakers to be able to get the best out of it, which comes in line with my posts earlier. I only use the EQ slightly tweaked to remove the "boominess" of the speakers, because all PC speakers are oriented more towards gaming than they are to music. And even there I don't have the low-range too cut off since the sound card allows for a thing called LFE crossover, which basically removes the lows from the tweeters and directs them to the sub-woofer.

All in all, the EQ should only be used slightly to overturn from the room conditions and/or speaker limitations. Or if you just like to mess around with it plain and simple. Speaking about docks and laptop speakers is a lost cause because none of those is able to output sound decently, even those so called "multimedia laptops" with Boose or Altec Lansing speakers. And then you're again limited by the DAC on the laptop's sound card, which is never ever good. Docking stations are limited by the DAC on the media player so again the quality can't be fantastic.

I agree with you mostly but there are decent things in the digital to play music.

Dude, what's with your obsession with DACs? Consumer-grade sound cards are absolutely fine for playing music, and the significance of DAC quality for EQing music is pretty much nil.

Do you even know what you're talking about? Try reading a bit.

Since the DAC is in fact the "heart" of every digital sound equipment, and the central piece in giving an output (i.e. the actual sound!) I'd say it matters just a bit. Just a tiny little bit. But whatever you say...

Do you even know how to read? Clearly not, so let me spoon-feed you:

All consumer sound cards already perform well enough for listening.
> Hence, any worries about having shitty DACs are unjustified.
> Hence, any worries about DACs having a noticeable negative impact on the output (i.e. the actual sound!) are unjustified.

Also, no one here is running a mastering studio and doing all sorts of audio wizardry to lossless files with 24-bit 192 khz quality and worrying about ultra-accurate audio reproduction.
> Therefore, DACs and DAC quality are completely irrelevant to this discussion.

This thread has already outlived its usefulness.

Saying that any onboard sound card is as good as a dedicated one is the same to say that any onboard video card is as good as a dedicated one. It's not exactly on the same scale because many onboard sound cards already use THX and 7.1 DTS norms, but still, to imply that anything onboard is better than a dedicated expansion card is false.

I don't want to carry this further more into off-topic territory but next you're going to tell me that every MP3 player sounds the same. Oh and by the way, the better the DAC on the device you're playing music the better and more normalized is the output signal. And since this discussion is about equalizing the output sound then I'd say that the quality of the output signal (translated by the DAC) is relevant. But I digress.

Please tell me where I've mentioned or implied anything about onboard vs. outboard? As a matter of fact, I've automatically excluded outboards since I've strictly referred to consumer grade sound cards, e.g. the ones that come onboard in laptops. You're only derailing the thread with this.

But since you've mentioned it, outboards are almost always prosumer to professional grade and of higher quality, yes. HOWEVER, play the same 16-bit/44.1 khz mp3 file on both onboards and outboards and you'd still be hard-pressed to find any significant gap in quality between them. The fact of the matter remains that onboards, just as much as outboards, are specifically designed for this purpose. The performance stalemate between the two ends when higher sample rates and bit depths are involved, which are what outboards are designed for, for purposes outside the scope of this thread.


They sound close enough that variations among them are negligible and unnoticeable. I'll bet you anything that if I blindfold you and put you in a room with your car stereo, your iPod, and your laptop all with the same settings and connected to the same set of speakers, you would never be able to tell which one is playing at any time.


See above.


Nowhere near as relevant as the quality of the actual sound file and equalizer. The sound will always be as good as the weakest link, and it's almost never the DAC.

Fair enough.


I've played the same MP3 files and CDs through the same speakers with onboard sound, a Creative X-Fi and an Asus Xonar. They all sound different. I suppose you've never experimented with a great "outboard" sound card, but from my years of experience I can tell you that there's a whole world of difference. Clarity and sound definition are way more pronounced the better the sound card is. You forget that it's not only the source signal but also the decoding device that produce the sound you hear.


Don't bet something you don't want to loose. If I have the same MP3 file on an iPod and on a smartphone, and play them with flat EQ through the same speakers/headphones they will sound different. That's because despite the source signal being the same the decoder used is different. The hardware and software is different, how can the sound be the same? This has more to do with reason and logic than it has to do with blind testing.


See above. But if you want the long version, better sound quality requires less tweaking to attain the same results.

I only have +4dB on 100Hz and +2dB on 200Hz, since my headphones can easily handle it and I use an 5.1 setup at home so I'm used to have some bass. My sound card is old (AC'97) and needs some adjustments.

I have a great outboard sound card and have noticed no significant difference when playing mp3s through it and my somewhat decent onboard.

Welcome to the Land of Subjectivity. Please visit the Ministry of Clarity and Definition to file your disagreements on aural matters.


Same tired argument as the DAC, really. Yes, there are differences, but unless you're using a device that's been made by a militiaman in East Timor whose hobby involves no such thing as computers, then chances are the differences are minuscule enough that they're insignificant and consequently imperceptible to us. Sound cards and decoders have come a long way since you've bought that desktop in 1996, and they're pretty much all on equal ground today.


Yeah because blind testing somehow goes against reason and logic... What?
Look, believe it or not, knowing what you're listening through has a HUGE impact on your preference. As soon as you take away things like the image, the price tag, the brand name, the marketing, the reviews and all that shit and leave nothing but the audio, then you'll realize the skewness of your perception. After all, you don't want something like buyer's remorse to bite you in the ass, do you? The fact is that confirmation bias is always the number one problem in these discussions, and I've seen this everywhere. You can't settle it and make a sound judgment until you do a blind test, because otherwise you're most likely bullshitting yourself into thinking that one thing is better than the other when in fact they're really not that different.

This is all inane in the context of the thread anyway. Keep in mind that OP is listening through cheapo speakers, and apparently with a shitty reverb preset too. All this arguing about DACs and decoders don't mean dick.

You know, I let the somehow biased (you seem to love this word so I'll be using it too) argument about my car stereo, my iPod and my laptop pass because I thought "Hey, he's not going out on personal attacks, maybe I'm reading between the lines". Now you bring to the conversation the "desktop I bought in 1996" as to imply that I live in yesterday or something. And this is all your assumptions since you have no idea what I actually own or not. I'm a reasonably calm and tempered person but if you want to go into personal attacks I've got nothing else to you than a big "fuck you". Now, I'm not telling you to go fuck yourself, that would be rude, but in the event that you're taking this all too personally I can guarantee you that I will too. I hate it when people have to use personal attacks when reasoning about something, it's as if they were uncertain of themselves and had to prove their point by force. So this will be my last post in this thread no matter what. Please read it carefully and attentively because I'm not going to repeat myself again.


Well, too bad for you. I've noticed clear differences on music reproduction when using different sound cards whose architecture was made around different DACs. Now you can trust me that I'm not lying or you can call me a liar. Welcome to the land of objectivity, please procure a keen eye and a good sense of logic to understand this.


Oh yes, they're all the same and everything is the same and there's no point in spending money here and not there. I wonder why people pick up specific brands of equipment if they all sound the same. Beats me if I know really. I'm guessing you also think that Apple and Sony MP3 players give out the same sound, alas everything is the same. Everything is normalized and nothing differs from the rest and all we do is base ourselves on personal taste. Sure...


Corporations rule the world, they're all sitting down at the poker table and laughing at you because the placebo effect has made them win millions once again! Hurray!

It's funny how you can consistently state that everyone besides you is wrong. Everyone who tested and written about sound equipment have no idea what they're on because as you say everything is the same shit and spending $100 or $500 is the same because it will sound the same. And of course that no one can convince that they've heard differences because you know so much better than everyone else and, oh that's right, everything's the same. You shun my arguments for beating a dead horse with facts but what do you do? The same, except for the part where you replace facts and specialists opinions, or plain and simple other people's experiences with said gear, in favour of generic conspiracy cliches that you let yourself indulge in as to justify your biased view of the world. Everyone's different but you're able to somehow see everything in monochromatic tones, either they're with you and right or against you and wrong.

I'd like to use this space now to apologize myself to the OP and Mods running the boards for taking this so far. Forgive me for that but I sometimes feel the need to defend myself when things start to reek of personal attacks and bullshit arguments.

Over and out.

I generally just use the default unless an album sounds particularly off, but since switching from WMP to WinAmp, saved presets have made me much more eager to mess around a bit. Right now I have about a dozen albums that I bother to adjust EQ settings on, and a number of those are for demos. Most of them have 180-360kHz down by about 2db, and 1200-1400kHz up by about 2db. Necroticism is an exception, which I have fairly heavily mid-scooped, and I've murdered the low end and pumped the higher frequencies for Mekong Delta's Dances of Death (which still sounds damn ugly anyways). Actually, mine for Holy Terror's Terror and Submission is a bit weird too, but I think my rip of that album might just be a little crappy to begin with.

androdion, I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. Also, I'm sorry that my ears are not nearly as evolved as yours, so much that you're able to pick out the fluctuating distortions of the powers of the universe coming from a single piece of electronic equipment manufactured in The Year of Our Lord 2012. Heavens fuck me, I'm not worthy!

But you're right. As you arrogantly and dismissively wrote at the beginning of your very first reply to me, I obviously don't know what the fuck I'm talking about here, and that makes me a biased conspiracy idiot. To remedy that, I shall refer you to people who do know exactly what they're talking about.

I invite everyone to watch this video. If you don't learn a thing or two from it, then you'll never learn, period.

Scoop the mids, bump the extremes. Boom.