Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Equalizer

[Brendan Martens <shrift gmail com>]

> Please read my whole email before starting to answer it. It is clear
> to
> me that you have completely misunderstood my sentiments.
I read your entire email, several times. Maybe I did not understand
something about what you were saying, but I think I got the general
idea, especially given the reply you just made.

> 
> An EQ definitely belongs in the pipeline---at the *end*. Thankfully,
> good sound drivers offer this functionality (My EMU10k1 driver does,
> at
> least).
> 
> The responses of your audio equipment, room, ears and brain are not
> selective, they respond in a consistent fashion. Thus having an EQ
> just
> for music is utterly pointless, unless you are specifically being
> creative. 

You are completely wrong here. Every single track recorded is going to
be a little bit different than the last. More notably every album
recorded is different. I'll stick to your assumption here that "creative
eq" is a bad thing, given that, and that albums are all equalized
differently in the studio, with different hardware and with a different
set of people's ears, a different eq setting would be necessary for
every album to achieve a "consistent" sound. So please don't say that
having eq for music is pointless, that is just ludicrous.


> If your music is truly lacking in specific regions, then so
> are all of your other system sounds, voice communications, etc.
> Thankfully, an EQ at the end of the audio pipeline (e.g. in the ALSA
> driver or in PulseAudio) alleviates this effectively. 

I agree with this, it would be nice to have an eq at the end to fix
overall issues that are associated with the audio setup, and not the
audio source files themselves. If I had to choose just one of the two
though (I'm not saying we do) I would go with an eq in the music player
because I honestly don't care too much what my pidgin alerts sound like.