Just wondering, what Equaliser settings you guys use for listening to the Volta? I usually use the "Perfect" EQ setting found on the internet. Are there any techies out there who know what they're doing and customise the bands to certain aspects of the Volta? (Bass, Ikey, etc...)
G.

Whenever I owned an Ipod I set the equalizer to bring out his voice and the keyboards more.

Flat.

I like a lot of low end in whatever I listen to

I usually bump up the treble and bass, with a slight dip in the mids. This sounds good at higher volumes.

lounge ;)

Disco Smile

Flat with a Boost on bass

I maximize the highs so i can only hear omars ear burning wah solos and cedrix prepubescent cries for help.

i usually bring up the mid-highs (vocals & most guitar) and the lows, bring down the mids slightly and slightly raise the 16k if the cymbals get too lost

but i eq like every song i listen to

i usually dont EQ any songs but when i do i usually up the vocals and drums

depends on the speakers.

Depends on the room. I like to listen to music how the engineer intended it to be heard, however, every room is different. My room tends to dampen top end, and have a pretty loose bass response. Mostly just keep my amplifier to boost 3 dB shelf at 8k, slight presence boost at 16k and above as well. cut everything below 30Hz because my speakers don't produce that low, anyway.

But none of this matters to any of you because we are all listening in different environments. I trust that Rich Costey did a damn good job on those mixes, and I like to keep everything as flat as possible to truly represent that. You should, too!

dont worry about EQ unless you dont have great speakers or have weird sounding acoustics in your listening environment

ITS ALL ABOUT HOW YOU VOICE THE CROSSOVER!

Play it flat. They spend a lot of time and money producing, mixing and mastering. Give them the benefit of the doubt, they're professionals. You only need to mess with the EQ on high-quality speakers and very rarely because of the room acoustics. It's all psychological anyway, you only notice the difference if you think there is one, if you get me.

My advice to everyone who takes listening to music seriously: get studio monitors and listen to everything with no EQ. You can get a pair of decent monitors for $150, and you get the full experience the band wants you to have.

Just get a decent hi fi.

You got it the other way around: unless you have a hi-fi you will never really hear it as it was intended by the engineers with a flat EQ. Speakers and audio systems have different frequency response, some sound more bassy others less trebly, etc. EQing may be used with "low quality" equipment to even this imperfections. Rarely you will see audiophiles with expesive rigs EQing anything, because the speakers have what is called a flat response, so they don't "color" the sound.

But in the end you are right, it's all matter of personal choice. Some people may find more appealing to hear a record in a not so good system with a preseted EQ setting while other may like to hear the same record on a thousand dollar rig in a acustically treated room. And going a bit out of the subject matter, there are studies about lots of people who actually prefer the sound of a 128 mp3 rather than a wav.

BTW I use flat EQ, but I use quite bassy headphones.

There are some people who don't know what is good for them.... mp3s over wav is just silly. People like compression, though, that's why the state of the music industry is where it's at, loudness wars, over-compressed everything.

anyway--the most important part of a speaker system in terms of "EQ'ing" is definitely the listening environment. This will have the most drastic change in sound. You can EQ things as much as you want, but the room will still suck and begin to color and affect the signal no matter how close or far you are from the speaker or the source. Think about listening in a cave, or your bathroom. There's not much you can do to EQ the sounds of the reflections to make it sound better.

I listen to everything in my car on a fairly high-end setup. No EQ used at all on the iPod. Everything is controlled by the headunit, which is - simply put - "flat" with a bit of a bump on the high and high-midrange. I tend to adjust it on a per-album basis though, usually keeping it as flat as I can.

And, whenever possible, I use apple lossless (or WAV/FLAC if I'm not tied to my iPod) over mp3 any chance I can get.

Interesting that most of you play it the way Omar and the music engineers intended... I thought some of you might, as we all know he likes to hide easter eggs in his songs...

poor Ikey, not even EQ can save him. flat, not sure what the need for anything else is

The keyboard parts are prominent on every album. I really don't understand why everyone thinks they are inaudible.
I'm not saying this applies to you, but anyone who prefers a 128 kbps MP3 over a lossless file is a total idiot. "I like music better when it's saturated with digital distortion and sounds nice and scratchy. The CD version doesn't sound as good as my MP3 I ripped with iTunes at the low bitrate I have selected" What the hell is that? It makes no sense. ARGH

I believe though, strangely enough... people are weird. I think on first listen, people just don't notice the details provided by lossless audio. But it's kinda moot whether people prefer mp3 over lossless files because the truth of the matter is that they don't sound clear, flat, or plain representative of what the professional mixing and mastering engineers spend large amounts of time achieving. No engineer is ok with mp3... we don't spend thousand upon thousands of dollars on high end converters and low-jitter clocks et cetera et cetera just to have it end up sounding crappy anyway. All the audiophiles know what's up; all the people like myself who have belt-driven turntables with expensive cartridges and cryogenically frozen power cables and the heavyweight vinyls... that is the polar opposite to all this, and fortunately it does exist, unfortunately the audiophile market is not nearly as huge as the mp3 market.

Makes me sad.
it's the same as the large majority of people who go to the movies to see a big dumb movie like Transformers 2 and think that that is a good movie, and it makes a huge sum of money.
Of course, they torrented the a DVD rip of the movie, too, that's pretty shitty quality.

Definitely depends on the type of music and the quality of the medium.

It seems though I usually like to boost a couple dB on the real low end, around 30 and 60Hz.

A couple dB cut at 250Hz and/or 500Hz.

And boost or cut 2k, 4k and 8k a little bit, whatever the situation needs.