How Not To Use an Equalizer

[Eboy87]

These are the two graphics we had for the four monitor mixes. I wasn't the one who set them, but one guy kept pulling out frequencies, then started complaining when he couldn't get enough volume out of the wedges. I present this photo for your viewing pleasure.



Discuss.

[Grog12]

Sheer genius.

[kovacika]

What, you mean it doesn't sound as good with them all down? But that means there will be no feedback right?

I don't think I'd be able to keep my mouth shut. Was it a guest engineer? Whos gear? You'd think that someone bright enough to buy KT's would know how to use them.

[highschooltech]

Pure genius there is absolutely no feedback from the monitors even with the mic pointed directly at them. The only downside is that you can't hear anything.

[DaveySimps]

Absolutely RIDICULOUS! I have had similar expirences with guest engineers touring with national acts. It just amazes me.

~Dave

[museav]

Although that looks a bit extreme, I would have to know more about the situation to comment. Having to EQ that much, at least on the top unit, to get an acceptable result indicates they were perhaps trying to fix problems with EQ that are better addressed in other ways but that may have been the only tool available to them.

As far as using only cuts, many people believe in using cut only EQ, especially for monitor EQ where the primary goal is eliminating feedback frequencies. In fact the DN360 manual actually recommends attenuating peaks rather than boosting dips, there are numerous good reasons for this from the fact that people are more sensitive to peaks in responses than to dips to the DN360 having a clip indicator and gain control only for the input so that any gain in the level due to the EQ applied could cause it to clip internally without any visual indication.

What many people do forget about the DN360 is that although the outputs are XLR connectors, the standard outputs are unbalanced (transformer balanced outputs are an option) and both the inputs and outputs are Pin 3 positive/hot, not Pin 2 as is typical. So the wiring for the standard output is shield to pin 1 and hot to Pin 3 with no connection to Pin 2, hardly your typical XLR output wiring.

[Dillon]

and the range is set to 12dB, no less.

[audioslavematt]

Gain reduction through equalization? I thinks so.

[Hughesie]

either that or just stupidity, i did that once then i stepped back and said, will i ever really need that large amount of power out of the foldbacks i mean i am FOH and i can hear them over the foh speakers. People do stupid things as long as someone can get a laugh out of it all is good

[SHARYNF]

Not that I would ever recommend setting up a geq that way, BUT it looks like the person doing the settings was first of all using the concept that it is not a good idea to BOOST a frequency range with a geq, that coupled with the likely hood that they were dealing with a speaker system that had poor low end and high end response, in essence what they were attempting to do was to boost the low and highs, but accomplish it by bringing down the mids.

The bottom KT UNIT looks like someone was again using the idea of only reduce don't boost, was trying to eq a system where the overlap in the low end and high end caused a bump in the middle, and was dropping the mids to remove some of that effect.
Again I would not recommend it but it is probably not so totally off the wall as might be imagined.

Sharyn