Understanding EQ and Measurements For Gaming, Music, and More! - PC and Console Included!

hey what's up everyone it's Joel from Gad stre Tech and in today's video we're going to talk about doing custom EQ or what equalizer changes mean how the settings work so you can understand what is happening behind the scenes and hopefully use that to make your own maybe fix some of the stuff that you've done before or at least get the most out of your products it's also going to help explain my Approach on all of this and kind of give you the backstory and some things along the way so what is EQ well EQ is basically using some form of software or hardware and there's different methods of EQ to alter the sound of the device you're listening to and you can increase certain sounds or decrease certain sounds maybe you want less bass or more bass maybe you want more treble or less treble so in a simple sense that's how it works now where it gets tricky is what do you adjust how much do you adjust by is there a right or wrong and in a simple sense is some audio files and you know rightly so they've been doing this for a long time some people will definitely wince at extreme EQ settings because uh it typically Alters the sound in a in a negative way if you go too hard with custom EQ for the device you're using it also can introduce other issues but in the context of doing EQ you want to still preserve a somewhat natural sound however at the end of the day if you make your own setting that you like who cares what other people think it's for you you're if you're sharing it with the community and say this is the best EQ you can do and it's pretty bad then you know maybe do some research but at the end of the day do stuff that makes you happy so um I'm going to do a few different headset explanations I'll show you equalizer APO and piece add-on for Windows I'll show you a snapshot of Dolby Atmos Turtle Beach stealth software and of course the Astro 50x uh that we're on screen with now because this is actually a really good headset for doing cust EQ in explaining it so before I get any further I want to talk about how my measurements work so I have a very large measurement database in fact I'll pull it up for you now this database has a lot of headset measurements and a lot of headphone measurements and I'm not done I add more all the time so let's say you have a Corsair hs80 this is how it measured on my rig with the stock flat EQ and then you look at the Odyssey Maxwell very different sound signature so doing all this helps get you a better understanding of you know how it measures on my system so my system is using this I don't know how well this is going to get cut on the camera I have gross KB 006 pinac clones and I use an i711 coupler clone which allows me to monit or test both the left and right channel I do multiple measurements of each side and that also converts to allow me to review IMS and wireless earbuds when I do this so I'm going to minimize this here this program is called R uh Rue Rew room EQ wizard so if I want to do a new measurement and on the Astro software let's just show here that it's on default I've made some changes so this is in a very simple sense but in my preferences I have the output device being my Astro headset and the input is one of my XLR interfaces which is that on camera oh look at that it's in so that's my wave interface I was trying to be careful not to unplug it or I'll mess things up so if I click measure I'm going to bring this over here now I'm going to be quiet during this very short part but this is where I name my measurement and right here I'm measuring the Left Channel because that's where my microphone is so I'm going to hit start there we go so my measurement's done now I'm going to clear all uh measurements that I have here and let's just pull up the last one I just did so this is what I just measure with the flat EQ and it's a little Jagged this is kind of normal typically when you do ovar measurements you use the actions in Rue and do 124 smoothing and you can see the line looks a little bit more normal uh we're getting rid of the artifacts and stuff that frame isn't going to change anything for how we understand the sound so what this measurement indicates is how my artificial ears hear the headset that's really important because if you compare my measurements to someone else's measurements unless they have my exact rig and place the headset the exact same way it's going to be interpreted slightly differently so you can use my website to compare measurements from one headset to another on my rig don't use my measurement and then ratings or headphones.com and assume that there's 100% parity here because Earp and all these other changes happen but you know if I were to compare the 50x just to show you how to use this site by the way this is important as well so you can see the URL at the top here if I click on the plus sign next to A50 Gen 4 now it's showing me what the flat profile of the Gen 4 sounds like compared to the flat profile on on the a5x I say flat profile because this is the next step I want to talk about when we look at the Astro software the default EQ shows flat you can see here that the line is flat that means the EQ is flat it doesn't mean that the headset is flat which you can see here in the measurements so when you're making changes you're not shaping your own custom curve from scratch you are modifying the existing curve of the headset and that's why on the audio file side of things if you're going plus and minus to all these extremes you're not going to have a smooth response on the sound profile so I did that so to show you what that means this is the default sound profile as measured earlier with the exact placement that I had now if I look at modifying the EQ and here is a graphic equalizer setting of 500 HZ plus 6 DB you can see there's a spike right here that's the only thing I modified everything else is essentially the same but you can see this big lift at 500 HZ that doesn't quite follow a natural frequency response so that frequency area as a whole will stand out now if I do this is graphic EQ there's another thing called parametric EQ which the red line you can see is fairly close and that has a Q factor setting of 1.5 so what is a Q factor I'm so glad you asked now it's time to understand how this works this is more of a mathematical thing a Q factor um basically represents how much of a how wide your bandwidth is when targeting frequency response so if you go from one octave to another so which is let's say 1,000 Hertz to 2,000 htz you your Q factor is 1.414 technically because and I think I can just pull this up on a calculator here if you see this calculator so if I just do the square root of two there is my 1.41 conversely if you're going wider and I gave you I pulled up a little chart here just to give you a screenshot opportunity so if you want to address more octaves to span have a wider impact on your frequency response your Q factor would go down 7 will address two full octaves 1.4 one octaves 2.8 half an octave and when you look at that on software so let's go to my new equalizer preset this this is just a demo Q factor on this 1,00 Hertz or 1 khz you can see down here it says 2.8 if I change this to 707 look what it does now I'm widening my impact on the sound so if you want we can measure this so let's go all the way to3 let's go really wide and of course I uh modified which one I was changing so let's fix that so you can see a nice wide sweep at 1,00 HZ everything else is set to flat so we're going to clear these measurements and we're going to measure now compared to the stock sound signature the Orange Line represents the change I just made by having a really wide Q factor you can see I lifted this huge area right here so let's go back to the Logitech software the ghub software and I'm going to set the Q to four and look what happens do you see how narrow that got that is a massive change so let's measure it again now if we look and again I'll clean up the line this is the exact same decibel lift at the same exact frequency we're targeting what was it 1,000 khz right the only thing I changed was the Q factor how wide or narrow and look at what that did to the sound signature massive difference in the mid-range massive difference in the treble and presence region you know as the frequencies go up instead with an Q factor of four which is pretty narrow I'm only addressing this narrow Peak kind of right here because you can see this still follows a general curve anyway so I'm really only targeting again very narrow window and if you look at that little chart that I had earlier it's essentially a third of an octave you know close to it being 4.3 doing a third so how does this translate well visually that's what you see in the graph but how you would use that in real life is if you want to lift all of the base as a whole May maybe Target 80 hzz and do a wide Q factor and it's going to have a huge impact on the wide frequency of Base so if you find that your headset is too base heavy that's or too base light that's one way you can do it is with a wide Q now if the base is very strong you could do the same thing a q of 0.5 for example and minus 4 DB you know and just start from there and this is kind of how you play around with the sound impact now the Logitech software cool because it gives you a visual aid on how this works so I'm going to zero this out and I want to show you we'll do something with the base here zero gain and let's go this one's 50 HZ so let's switch this to 70 well we'll do we'll do 64 Hertz then we'll do a lift of four and this is how I'm lifting my base that's not again not my curve but how I'm focusing on lifting the base if I go to three you you can see now I'm lifting base as a whole now this is a fun way to do custom EQ to understand what you're doing now let's say I wanted to lift uh footsteps because I talk about custom EQ in game so I'm going to set this back to zero and I'm going to Target 125 Hertz here I want to do a 5 dbel lift but Q factor of 1.5 isn't bad maybe I want to be a little bit more narrow so I'll go 1.8 you can see it's a little B bit more narrow now the impact of this is I am also increasing the base a little bit at 200 250 Herz you can see this uh drop off that's because parametric EQ is logarithmic it's not linear so what I could do is take this frequency let's say 220 htz again this is just a visual example minus 3db with a Q factor and look at the difference already on my sound a Q factor of two I want to narrowly reduce some of this base so now I'm I'm emphasizing 125 Herz which is a great frequency to emphas emphasize for games like Call of Duty but I'm cleaning up the mix a little bit by getting rid of that muddy sound of the Bas this is really important for something like the Astro A50 which sounds a little bit thick and heavy in the base region I can still benefit from boosted base where I want it but clean up the base that I don't care conversely if I go to 20 Herz Min - 6 DB and of course I did plus 6 let's go to minus 6 and look what that does to the base curve so again I'm only focusing on the base frequencies I didn't modify my treble at all and now I'm benefiting from this base Focus so that's how parametric EQ works now if you have the ability to run parametric EQ let's say you have the Astro a5x which this saves to the headset amazing for console players because now you benefit from this the other options on PC are using the piece add-on which is this guy right here for equalizer APO I will have links in the description below it's not as visual initially but you can see all these frequencies up here the advantage to parametric EQ on piece compared to Astros A50 for example is this one's capped at 6 DB maybe you need more than six or less than six uh or Nega less than negative six if you're doing something more extreme you can also do more than 10 bands which is pretty complex obviously so you can really fine-tune it and then you can even do something called the shelf which is where you lift everything very widely at a low side or a high side so again if I wanted to lift all the frequencies above 14,000 Hertz for example I can type 14,000 right here and let's type this correctly and I'll switch this to a high shelf and let's do Oops I Did High shelf Q is slope I just want to do a high shelf for now which gets rid of the Q option 5 dbel lift and then if I go to the visualizer this is the impact of that EQ setting this is not this is like specific to Call of Duty for the vzr model one so the rest of it's going to look kind of weird but if I get rid of that shelf right here and I switch it to zero Watch What Happens right up here you see how it dropped so it's a very powerful tool and you have different ways to do it sonar from steel series also gives you a 10 band parametric EQ and I think it goes to plus or minus 9 or 10 DB so you get a lot of flexibility there and you can even do a Q factor as narrow as like 10 so you can really create notches when you would create a notch so the whole CU factor of 10 for example or eight something really specific is like when I measure my games for custom Target curves I hear like a ticking sound from Call of Duty something that's really earpiercing and annoying and frankly doesn't have as much of an overlap with other sounds I might Target that frequency and reduce it by 3 or 4 DB so I had one in the 4,000 HT region on my Modern Warfare video for Search and Destroy I believe it was I created a little narrow Notch and then you can lift or reduce it depending on if something that that's something you want to hear or something you want to get rid of so you can see how powerful this is now not everyone has the ability to do parametric EQ but I wanted to start with parametric EQ not just because it's the most advanced but because the Q factor thing is really important to understand because if I toggle off Advanced on Astro software you see a 10 band now this is not a traditional 10 Band by the way a traditional 10 band EQ is more like this where you get 32 64 125 250 500 Etc if you notice these octaves are doubling each other or these frequencies are doubling each other so that's that whole double the octave thing which means on something like Dolby Atmos my Q factor is essentially 1.41 on a fixed 10 band or graphic equalizer you can adjust the sliders up and down but you cannot choose your Q factor how wide or narrow so it's important to know that assume everything you see here in this case has a Q factor of 1.4 this is going to come in handy later in the video when I show you how to visualize custom EQ changes on uh my Squig link page so this is the like I said of setting 1.4 if you go to something like let me pull up I believe I have a screenshot of my Turtle Beach setting now if you look at the custom EQ options on the 10 band for the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro again you see something very similar with the bands doubling each other this again is where you can assume your Q factor is 1.5 so now that you know how this impacts it if you're boosting 125 Hertz you would want to reduce the 250 a little bit to compensate otherwise just keep in mind you're going to increase that as well now here's where it gets really cool because we have a frequency response measurement again on the Astro a5x with my rig you can see that if I expand down and I look at different Tunes my custom EQ if I change the color here will measure like this and that's because of all the stuff I did on my Astro a5x review reducing the bass and increasing the higher frequencies a little bit I like this a lot for music in general gaming now this is the first time I'm publicly discussing my war zone 2023 2024 beta EQ something specific for a game this is where I want to change how we look at audio because if you look at sonar and I do want to give steel series credit I'm going to open it right now I want to give steel series credit for doing so many custom game eqs it's a lot of work now I don't know how accurate all of them are I haven't played all the games but the fact that they're giving you these options to do game presets and the fact that you can use sonar to effectively modify the sound of any audio device you own is awesome so now that I've enabled sonar I can browse a lot of their game presets and you can see this target curve right here this again that's not the target curve of your headset or that's not the exact way your headset's going to sound it is simply boosting Base by a bit scooping the mids and then boosting treble if you have a headset that's already boosted in this area recessed in the mids and boosted in the treble this is going to be a very strong EQ for you you're going to have tons of Bas and tons of treble and it's not going to complement it as well so what I'm trying to do and after it takes about 40 hours per game EQ is make my own custom targets now you can see this squiggly line looks all weird right but if you look closely you know when you compare to the Harmon curve the Harmon curve is this dotted line right here which is kind of like a general sound profile that most people like it's safer sound profile so when you look at my war zone 2024 beta which if you're doing this do this on a computer not a phone because it's really hard to navigate this site if you click on it this area up here your higher frequencies are a little bit different so some people may not like this again this is just a Target that I've been working on you can tweak yourselves later and that's why understanding how all of this worked prior to this part was really important so this as you can see the Basse doesn't really adhere to what I think is the ideal sound for war zone again beta Target so check out how amazing this tool is if I click on equalizer once my target is enabled and I have a single headset on the screen or at least I chose one if I had multiple I can click something called Auto EQ the website will now automatically make my own 10 band parametric EQ preset for the Astro a5x for Call of Duty war zone not a universal EQ it is specific and it's like right on the money not everyone's going to like this EQ but now that you know how that works you can adjust this so the thing to keep in mind if for the example on the Astro a5x you can see a gain here of minus 7.7 this is just to adhere to the curve it doesn't have to be perfect now the software only lets you go to minus 6 so if I change this to minus 6 let's fix that minus 6 again you can see I'm a little bit higher than the target but that's okay it's not the end of the world and it's still really close so anything that exceeds the B the boundary of what your software allows you to do just pull it back in I'm going to bring this to six everything else is within my gain level of plus or minus 6 and you can see it's actually really close to the Target curve so all I have to do if I want a specific war zone EQ for how this headset measures I look at those measurements I go to ghub click Advanced then I literally just copy this one by one I go to 26 Hertz here I do a gain of minus 6 which is there and a Q factor of0 6 so we're almost like right on the money just as my guess from earlier so 53 HZ is the next one I'm going to click this dot change it to 53 Hertz 3.6 DB and I have a Q factor of three and look how this is starting to change very quickly here and so I'm not going to go through every single one because this video is going to be kind of long anyway and this is quite uh an in-depth tutorial but there's - 6 Q factor of 2.8 do you see how cool this is starting to turn into I want to do one more for the 125 otherwise it looks pretty weird and I don't want people to pause it and assume that they're close so 6 dbel lift Q of 3.9 and now you can see how this looks on the software and what that translates to to what you hear insanely powerful so let's say I'm going to modify my model because we talked about the turtle bead uh Stealth Pro for example now this is how the Stealth Pro measured in a default sound profile you can see stock pad signature EQ this is also a nice benefit of doing it this way by the way because if you buy the wicked cushion freeze pad do you see how it's different that means a different EQ will benefit you more if you have a wicked cushion freeze pad it's not the same so my goal of this site is to help you get the best sound you can get for your exact setup and these pluses and minuses and X's is where you can choose the sound signature you can see WC freeze pad signature EQ so I'm going to get rid of it go back to Stealth Pro the default sound signature I'm going to go to EQ this is where it gets uh more timec consuming but this is how you translate it to the Turtle Beach software which again we have fixed bands here right so as much as I love to do the exact thing if you're on PC you can still get an exact perfect EQ with auto EQ and watch how powerful this is so you can see I hit the target pretty much perfectly I can hit export down here at the bottom it's going to export a text file save the text file to your desktop and then on the piece program again this is more for Windows people or if you want to type it in manually on uh steel series sonar you can do that so all I have to do is click on import right here and I can import whatever I export from this website and it'll Auto EQ everything it even sets the gain up here you're pre amplifying because if I'm doing plus 10 DB somewhere you need to pull the pre-amplifier down to basically 10 minus 7 in that window otherwise you might introduce Distortion because you're clipping at that point now I've already done this with several headsets so let's do the Corsair virtuo Pro for example yes I don't care about my settings this was the output of my website being imported into piece I didn't have to do anything myself and then I'm ready to go let's say you're playing for console though and you're really trying to get the most out of your headset we're going to go back over here now this would have been great if I can do it however I can't on Console because the app doesn't let me so what you need to do is if we look at this 10 band equalizer we have to clone this in the website so I'm going to round up and just do 32 Herz 64 125 Etc so we're going to fill these in real quick now there were two ways I could have approached this I could have skipped the auto EQ first because um if I know I'm doing graphic EQ only I didn't need to have any pre-filled out variables so it doesn't matter you can either type this in and modify it all the zero again so let's do that now so I have all the bands mirroring the program okay so which means once I hit this one on zero we're back to the stock sound signature with no EQ now the this is why I wanted to explain the video in the order I did your Q factor I'm going to hit contrl C and contrl V all of these because we know it's a 10 band fixed EQ and we understand how one octave represents a Q factor of 1.41 I'm going to set this tool to 1. 41 so we have now duplicated the software in the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro app the audio Hub app all I have to do now is start modifying this within the confines of the app so if the maximum I can do is minus 7 for example which it's not I can go all the way down to minus 9 but if I can go to minus 9 let's just try minus 9 here and do you see how this looks down here now it's not an identical representation on what what's below that um but it's very close so don't mind this little Spike that's just all we can do in the app so this is where you can see it's up in the 64 HZ area it you know hikes back up okay 80 HZ that's really close to an area that I can't easily address with graphic EQ but we're going to try so I'm going to bring this down a little bit this is the 64 htz that I'm adjusting oops I went to the wrong one here let's just lower that a little now I can tell you just to give you Insight on this curve this hump that you have in the 50 HZ area that's for The Loot Crate hum it's not vital it's just a little bit of an extra Edge so it's okay that we're miss that we're not boosting it too much now because I know I'm going to reduce this area a little bit it's already scooped pretty well at 250 so you can see there's not a lot of changes needed now from a personal preference this curve that you see right now is the closest we can really get with a fixed 10 band EQ so I understand it's not going to be a perfect match but we're going to try to use this as a tool again to closely match it as much as possible so if you look at 500 htz again I'm right there it's just a matter of if you want to lift it or not so let's just go to minus you know 0.5 DB I'll lift this a little bit we'll go plus5 the rest of this looks okay I think 2 KZ is slightly under so we're going to lift 2 khz just a little bit uh the 4 KZ could be lifted we're going to it's a mild EQ again this kind of shows why the Turtle Beach Stealth Pro does so well with um Call of Duty out of the box because the sound signature actually works quite nice now when you get to higher frequencies this is where there's a massive difference in what the measuring rig can hear versus what you hear um so don't take this as like the Bible as far as measurement goes when I do the auto EQ I actually ignore everything above 10K because it's not reliable enough however I can tell you that the 8 KZ Spike with the Turtle Beach is real and that's that really sharp like sound that can make your ears winse when guns fire uh or there's like a just a sharp piercing sound in the game so I'm going to reduce AK let's just go to minus 4 DB so the green line is my new Target curve and I've reduced this a little now I could bring some of this uh gain back up here in the two to four K region so let's just hit one full debel here let's bring four up a little bit and I'm going to go to Minus 5 DB on the AK area again this is with the stock pads so this target EQ is something you can do in the app and benefit on Console it's not like you're stuck with parametric EQ for PC or nothing that's how you match and get as close as you can with a 10 band fixed EQ this same thing applies for Dolby Atmos so if you're doing a 10 band EQ again let me pull up that picture here's Dolby Atmos you can see the bands are the same way also a que of 1.4 so Xbox users you can use atos PC users if you don't want to use any of the advanced software you can use Dolby Atmos to closely mirror it as well this is cool because we can also use different targets so if I go to the Harmon curve right here I can then make my own changes to better match something from music it's not so much an issue with certain headsets like this but if you look at something like the older Corsair hs80 which has a very off and different sound signature if I start modifying the custom EQ you can see that same EQ I had before for the Turtle Beach produces a wildly different result even on the war zone EQ it's completely different so again I would just do let's say plus4 here not liking what that looks like so I go to plus 6 this is too hot in the 1K region so I'm going to go to minus 3 DB and you can see this red line let's lift 500 by two and we have to reduce 250 for sure let's go minus 4 here and 125 Herz we're going to go to something more extreme like four nope that wasn't extreme enough let's go five so you can kind of see where the benefit of this is cuz now you can get the most out of your own headset and now that red line look how quickly I'm I'm approaching a more ideal sound signature for Call of Duty or again the Harmon curve if I wanted to match that for music performance which in this case I would lift 4 khz by 4 DB now because I listed lifted that and we have a Q of 1.4 I'm also lifting the lower frequencies so now I'm going to reduce 2,000 Herz by 2 DB and now I'm back more in line it's pretty amazing what you can do once you understand how the Q factor of 1.1 41 plays into this tool to kind of optimize your own sound signature we're going to straight up build a Harmon target or close to it just using this software on the stream or on this live recording because I'm not really doing any editing and just like that I have an hs80 that measured completely different already sounding a lot better to I think a lot of people I think they would like the way this performs so look at that I'm even more in line now this is just using 10 band I could have almost perfectly hit it if I'm using it on PC and I want to use those programs with parametric EQ all I have to do is Click Auto EQ and now look at the red line we're even closer to those curves or if I want one for Call of Duty I can click war zone beta hit Auto EQ again and now my hs8 is tuned with parametric EQ for war zone so I know this video was really complex but this is partly why my war zone EQ video has been delayed I'm likely going to reference this tutorial in the the Call of Duty video because this is a huge part of of getting the most out of your gear but hopefully this helps save you some time and now you can do some of the eqs of your own and I guess in summary to explain these frequencies very broadly you have some descriptions down here on the site as well if you click subbase it actually has written descriptions for you so use this as a tutorial to help you understand what you're changing this is probably the best way to quickly understand what you're addressing but play with it too because your ears are different than mine and you might have a different preference so again thank you so much for watching this if you found this video helpful please don't forget to like And subscribe that's where a lot of Brands look at regardless of viewer count they care how big the channels are and I'd love to keep providing more coverage for you all so thank you again and I'll see you next time [Music] bye 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Channel: GadgetryTech

Views: 11,311

Keywords: how to eq, how to make custom eq, how to eq headset, how to eq headphones, how to eq iems, best eq for headset, eq tutorial, parametric eq vs graphic eq, best eq for xbox, best eq for ps5, how to eq on computer, how to eq properly, eq, how to eq vocals, parametric eq explained, graphic eq explained

Id: 0Zg0noQvUQw

Length: 33min 3sec (1983 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024