OK.... for those folks who aren't familiar with the details.....
In the beginning... there were tone controls.
You had a "Bass" control, which allowed you to boost or cut mostly low frequencies...
And a "Treble" control, which allowed you to boost or cut mostly upper frequencies...
And each affected a relatively wide range of frequencies...
Soon after that you started seeing Bass and Treble controls where you could control the range of frequencies affected by each - at least to a degree.
Eventually, in some gear, they were joined by a "Midrange" control, which allowed you to boost or cut a band of frequencies somewhere in the middle.
However, with all of these, the range of frequencies affected by each control is pretty wide, and there is a lot of overlap.
Eventually tone controls were augmented or superseded by a "graphic equalizer".
With a graphic equalizer, instead of two or three controls, you have ten controls, each of which can boost or cut a narrower band of frequencies.
In most of them, each control band covers one octave, so for example, you have bands centered at 20 Hz, 40 Hz, 80 Hz, 160 Hz, etc.
It's called a "graphic equalizer" because many original models were controlled by a row of vertical sliders - which you could arrange to look like "a graph of the frequency response you were setting".
Later models added more bands - with some offering as many as thirty bands - or even more.
One catch with these is that you still have to know where you should set the controls - and there are an awful lot of them.
Another is that, in order to cut the audio up into a whole batch of bands, you have to run it through a whole bunch of relatively complicated filters, which introduces noise and distortion.
A PARAMETRIC EQ (or "PEQ") is the next step up.
With a PEQ, instead of a limited number of relatively wide bands, or a whole slew of narrow bands, you have a handful of bands, each of which you can set to be as wide or narrow as you need.
For EACH BAND on a PEQ, you can set the center frequency, the width of the band, and how much you want to boost or cut it.
This allows you to control the frequency response much more precisely - using fewer bands - and fewer settings.
NOTE that you DO NOT have to use all the bands.
Even though the PEQs on our newer processors offer 11 individual bands that you CAN use to adjust each channel individually...
In many cases, you can make the adjustments you need with only three or four carefully chosen and adjusted bands, which makes for a lot less work...
(And, as with most modern processor-based gear, this adjustment is done digitally, so you don't have to worry about all the extra noise and distortion that would have been added by that much analog circuitry.)
REW (Room Eq Wizard) is a FREE computer program that can be used, in conjunction with a microphone, to measure the acoustics of your room and your speakers.
It can then display the results of those measurements in a wide variety of extremely useful and informative ways.
It can then calculate, based on those results, how you would need to set the controls on your PEQ to correct the errors it's discovered and "correct the way your system sounds".
It can give you a printout of those recommended settings, which you can then enter into the PEQ on your processor manually.
Or it can export them as a file, which you can load directly into some processors, like our XMC-1 (there is a short list of processors that it knows how to talk to directly).
REQ is an incredibly powerful, and incredibly useful, program... but it is also quite complicated and has a rather steep learning curve.
DIRAC is quite simply a program that does pretty much the same thing.
Dirac takes measurements, then creates adjustments based on those measurements, with the goal of making your system sound more accurate.
While the details are very different between REW and Dirac - that same description applies equally to both.
One of the biggest differences is that Dirac does things a lot more automatically.
(Every program that does this sort of thing uses slightly different measurements, has different controls and priorities, and produces slightly different results.)
NOW... as for 24/96, and high-res files, and re-sampling, and all that jazz (or whatever you listen to).
This is another one of those subjects where an awful lot of people make an awful lot of assumptions - based on almost no first-hand knowledge.
HAVE YOU, PERSONALLY, EVER TAKEN A GOOD QUALITY 24/96k FILE, DOWN-SAMPLED IT TO 16/44k, AND LISTENED TO BOTH TO SEE IF YOU COULD HEAR A DIFFERENCE?
(And, if you have, have you actually listened carefully to decide whether one actually sounded better than the other, or you were just hearing a tiny difference due to the conversion itself?)
The reality is that, while a lot of "high-resolution" downloads do actually sound remarkably good, and quite often noticeably better than the CD version of the same album, often the reason is NOT because of the resolution.
Often the mastering is different - or more effort was spend making the "audiophile" version sound better.
And, when it comes to SACDs, almost every time the SACD is made from a different master than the CD, and that's where most of the difference actually lies.
And, of course, any vintage album, which was mastered on analog tape, is limited mostly by the quality of the analog tape medium.
A really well-mastered CD, limited to 16/44k, sounds incredibly good... so the problem with the ones that don't is NOT that they are only recorded at 16/44k.
So how much of your music database is actually recorded/mastered in +48khz?
Or are most of them just padded upto 192khz?
Do you hear anything at all in those frequencies? Can you hear a difference between a 44.1/24, 96/24 or 192/24?
To actually even have a chance of hearing a difference you’ll first have to have true HD recordings. Even then it’s
very hard to hear any difference.
Then also a VERY good 2ch setup with GREAT speakers would be handy..
IMO