EQ settings and what they do

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My car has a 13-band EQ (40 Hz, 63 Hz, 100 Hz, 160 Hz, 250 Hz, 500 Hz, 1.0 kHz, 1.6 kHz, 2.5 kHz, 4.0 kHz, 6.3 kHz, 10 kHz, and 16 kHz.)

Could someone please explain what each of those bands means? What do they correspond to? (highs, mids, lows, bass, vocals, different instruments, etc.)

Thanks!

In: Technology

9 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

I’ll try to eli5 this:

Sound is a (very mechanical) vibration. Your radio or whatever player sends electric signals that turn magnet in speakers or headphone on or off at rapid pace. This makes magnet move the paper glued to the magnet forth and back. Paper moves air molecules it collides with, and that movement of air (vibration) goes through your room or car, until it crashes against your ear drum and makes it move. Which makes you hear.

Middle-aged human ear [can hear from about 20Hz to 15 000Hz](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM4WSBZanQQ). Hertz is an unit of how many vibrations per second happen. 40Hz means paper of a speaker (and the air, and your eardrum) moves 40 times per second. 16 000Hz means the vibration is very rapid (16 000 times per second). Very young people might hear up to 22Khz, but as you go older, it drops to somewhere about 16Khz. Dogs and rodents can hear extremely high frequencies that humans don’t register at all. That’s where “dog whistles” and “rodent noise repellents” come from.

You can think of it as trying to push a heavy thing along the floor – if you push it slowly, it will scrape floor slowly (less Hz) and growl. If you pushed it really fast, it will produce a sound closer to a whine, so more Hz.

So, the frequency of vibration translates to what you hear: to about 400 Hz, it’s bass. 1-2Khz or 1000Hz – 2000Hz is typical frequency of human voice, thus vocals in terms of music or talk in terms of well, talking shows, sports commentary, stand up, audiobooks and such. This is usually most important to most people.

And anything higher is treble, meaning hi-hats, hiss, high-pitched noise and such.

So, on your equalizer, you can set how much bass (drums, bass guitar), mid-range (vocals, piano, guitar, etc) and treble (hi hats, triangles, tambourines, etc) you want.

__________

…And yes, all sound is just wiggling of air (or other medium, like water). What you hear is just about how rapidly it moves per second. And simply the rate of vibration can produce human speech, your favourite song and everything else. There’s no deeper “magic” to it. So technically, if you could wave a piece of thin plywood at exact right frequency, you could make it sound like human talking – with words and voice and everything, for example. Or play your favourite song down to a lyric and note (not sure how you could wiggle something tens of thousands of times per second, though).

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