whatever became of graphic equalizers for stereo component systems?

[KG]

been about 30 years since I had real audio equipment. replacing my 20 y.o. bookshelf system and going back to components. JBLs speakers on the way. have an old 100W reciever to power it till I decide on new one. my major component will be a laptop for music and internet radio. a TV later. maybe DVD player. any way to control the output other than bass and treble knobs?

[bluedigger]

1. There's one built in to Windows Media Player.

Does that count?

[OriginalGeek]

2. I think it's all done in software now

My car stereo has an equalizer built in. It's just one of the controls. I'm looking to build a home audio system too. Starting with an A/V receiver that can take inputs from cable, 3 video game systems, bd player, turntable, cassette, a computer I have yet to build...and whatever else I can think of. I want to be able to play games or music or movies from the PC and rip records to the PC and run all the other stuff with one central piece of equipment. I'm still just in early planning stages but nowhere have I even seen a stand alone equalizer. They're probably only for really high end systems maybe.

[canetoad]

4. VLC media player

Has some pretty good features and advanced controls, including an equaliser.

[hunter]

5. These old analog equalizers added a lot of noise to the system.

Maybe they could make a less expensive amplifier and speaker system sound a little more acceptable (and give the listener something more to fiddle with) but the cost in noise was high.

With cassettes and vinyl, which are already very noisy, this added noise wasn't so noticeable. With very high-end cassette systems you were lucky to get the equivalent of eight bits of music above the noise floor, compared to CD's sixteen bit resolution. More typically, home made mix tapes and Walkman style players replayed music equivalent to a five or six bit digital music stream.

The engineering art of mixing studio quality analog tapes to LP vinyl is another story... RIAA equalization is an astonishing thing. It transformed the sound engineer into one of the musicians.

Analog equalizers built for mastering both vinyl and tape were were very expensive and are still noisy, just not so bad as most consumer level equipment.

If you don't believe me, and have a fairly good sound card in your computer and good headphones, you can use a program like audacity to explore and experiment with all the horrors of old analog audio equipment.

I spent too many hours obsessively transferring our family's LPs and tapes to digital formats. It soon became clear to me that even good analog preamplifiers, equalizers, and other tools were crap. It was always best to record the source raw and then manipulate it digitally as necessary.

Short answer: Digital audio made analog equalizers obsolete. A computer with a good sound card and the right software can do a better job.

[KG]

6. easily portable digital music one the joys of life in my dotage. which is one of the

reasons i'm investing again in a good stereo equipment. digital sound quality is something i dreamed of back in the 70's.

the recent fascination with vinyl is something I find a bit puzzling.

[hunter]

7. FLAC lossless audio encoding and today's astonishingly inexpensive hard drives make me happy.

https://xiph.org/flac

I wanted to be a radio and television engineer when I started college. (I later switched to biology, but that's another story...) The high end EXPENSIVE analog studio equipment I got to play with in school wasn't nearly as good as today's average laptop with an average quality USB sound dongle.

Tube amps and LP's color sound in ways that are not unpleasant, but in comparison to modern digital equipment they are not "high fidelity."

My grandfather thought his 'fifties "hi fi" equipment was hot stuff, he even had a nice reel-to-reel tape machine that probably weighed about sixty pounds and was so full of tubes it could double as a room heater, but all that equipment was nowhere near as good as even modest modern digital audio equipment. An old iPod playing 192 kbps mp3 probably sounds sweeter than that tape machine did.

[trof]

8. I think you need a flux capacitor. Probably 12 megamillibars.

[jrandom421]

9. Hated graphic equalizers

Much preferred the parametric equalizers produced by SAE and Yamaha. You could adjust the center frequency of what you wanted to boost or cut, the amount of boost or cut, and the bandwidth of your boost and cut.

SAE had a 5 frequency parametric equalizer and it was the most useful and flexible piece of stereo gear I ever had.