Remove mid range boost EQ circuit?

[mr.duck]

Forgive the poor thread title; I'm not sure what to call it. But has anyone noticed that when listening to anything other than music and film, it sounds bad and is difficult to listen to because the mid range freq have been intentionally boosted up?

Best example is TV or radio adverts. They do it on purpose to make it difficult to ignore their advert.
But even TV programs with any narrator they will boost these freq - it's very annoying! Most people have crappy speakers so it sounds ok for them. Anything remotely hifi and it sounds bad.
Radio is unusable any time a song is over and someone starts talking.

I was thinking it would be possible to build some sort of passive filter that could undo much of this freq boost and make things usable again. Sounds to me like the upper bass freq have been boosted but not sure of exact freq. Anyone else found a way to "fix" their systems?

[Eva]

It's not equalization, it's compression. The lowest frequencies of the voice are turned into midrange harmonics to make it appear to sound louder on lo-fi tv sets and boom boxes. The process is based in distortion and is very hard to revert.

But modern music and sometimes movies suffer from the same problem...

[mr.duck]

Argh! That's so anoying then! So what's the solution? Now I'm thinking about some DIY speakers really lacking in bass / midrange grunt. Pair them with a subwoofer just like 2.1 channel computer multimedia speakers. Bah humbug.


Thanks for the explaination by the way.

[despotic931]

You could compress everything and make it all sound like garbage I suppose, lol.

- Justin

yea, there isn't any real way to "un-compress" something...

[Key]

Originally posted by Eva
It's not equalization, it's compression. The lowest frequencies of the voice are turned into midrange harmonics to make it appear to sound louder on lo-fi tv sets and boom boxes. The process is based in distortion and is very hard to revert.

But modern music and sometimes movies suffer from the same problem...

I would disagree. While hardlimiting/compression makes the problem worse it is not the cause. It is EQ most of the time imo. I find a wide Q EQ around 5-7kHz -3dB to work in more situations than it should - most every modern CD seems to have this lift. Bass is not so easy to guess at. Sometimes it just takes the same wide band Q around 20Hz. Other times there can be some nasty resonance around 100Hz and 200Hz. If you are getting too much kick drum or boom then sometimes maybe 60Hz. Bass isn't painful like high end so focus on getting an even mid to high end response first when EQing. You will usually have to bring the volume up to compensate and you will hear the lower mids and mids fill in. Remember you are not trying to kill the high end or bass just make them even out.