Downloadable Presets for Parametric EQ

What actually are you hoping to achieve with PEQ?

If your goal is to get as close to what the engineer intended — which arguably is what you should be striving for, at least to start, after all who better to decide when an album sounds it’s best — then what you actually want to be doing is applying EQ to achieve a flat (baseline) frequency response. Think of this as pressing the TARE button on a set of weighing scales.

Whatever is then played though your system will more closely mimic what was originally intended.. or that’s the theory. In practice it’s not quiet so simple!

With headphones — assuming each pair has been built to certain tolerances — you can measure any deviation from a flat response caused by the headphones and then arguable create a correction filter for them which can then be shared. In effect you’re fixing any shortcomings in the headphones frequency response curve where it deviates from a flat response.

The reason that works with headphones is that there is a minimal space between the drivers and your ears (or the microphones in a test rig) to worry about, in effect it will be the same for everyone and so profiles can be shared.

But in a domestic living room with walls, furnishings and reflections, nulls and peaks brought on by the size of the room and the position of the speakers in it and all importantly, where you are sitting in relation to the speakers. None of that is universal.

So while you could create a correction filters for a speaker in an anechoic chamber to bring it’s response closer to an near flat frequency response and some speakers with built in DSP do exactly that, that won’t fix any issues in your particular room.

If you want to create a correct filter for your room then have a look at the HouseCurve app. It will let you use your phone as a measurement device and create the PEQ filters for you, which you can then import into Roon.

Once you’ve achieved a flat response, then you can then use off an off the shelf preset to apply additional EQ adjustments. One such example might be the Harman Curve and to be fair the mastering engineer may well have mastered to a curved like that, rather than a truly flat frequency response, knowing that was the profile most likely to be found in living rooms. Likewise you might personally just like adding a bit of extra bass to everything.

But the main takeaway is that you can’t share PEQ presets for speakers in the same way as you can for headphones, everyone’s rooms are different.

If all you want to do is boost the bass a bit on everything you listen to, then have a search for applying LPF using PEQ and adjust by ear.

But there is no universal preset that can be shared to do that, unless we have both calibrated our speaker/room iteration to have a flat response first using something like REW or HouseCurve. My room might have a big wide peak at 1000hz which my PEQ might be aiming to reduce, conversely you might have a narrow null at 1000hz in your room, if you simply applied my PEQ setting you’d be making null even worse.

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