+1. The max number of bands I'll cut on a 31 band EQ is 4-6. That means after you pull down 2 or 3 faders on your 15 band EQ then STOP. Any more adjustments and you are trashing the sound and causing other problems.
I'd put a 31 band EQ on my wish list for Santa Claus.
Another reason you may find that you are pulling more frequencies then you should is the gain in the crossover for one or all drivers is wrong.
Imagine the speaker is active and bi-amped. On the crossover or the gain knob on the power amp you can change the gain of each driver.
You ring out the PA and find you are dropping every EQ fader from 1kHz to about 6kHz.
What this would tell me that the horn was too loud, not that it had a bunch of peaks in the highs. So push all the faders back to zero and turn down the highs on the crossover.
If you get it right you should have some faders above and some below with a few hotter peaks thrown in.
Beyond this if the speaker has a passive crossover and you have the same problems this again points to the crossover, but you cannot get at the crossover.
20 years ago this often was the problem. Using generic crossovers that only protected the drivers and did not fix any of their problems.
In this day and age you should not have this problem as long as you use speakers made in the last 10 years and had decent reputations.
As for the EQ you are using you are killing yourself with no improvement.
IF you buy expensive monitors that are supposed to be flat out of the box and you use an expensive vocal mic that does not need EQ out of the box you should not need much of an EQ on the monitor speaker.
Another way to approach this is at the FOH vocal mic channel.
Typical setup when running monitors from your FOH board is to set the routing for Pre-EQ so when you did something at the FOH it did not screw with the monitors. In this case I suggest you do not have the correct EQ (1/3rd Oct) so we need to take a chance.
Either set the vocal channels monitor for post-EQ or shift the monitors to an effects AUX that is already Post-EQ.
Try this and be careful.
I know people that do this all the time, but their monitor’s speakers are very good.
If the EQ on the vocal channels is limited and sounds like crap the only thing left is to look for and buy a vocal mic that needs no EQ from 100Hz to 6kHz.
Above and below that you can use your 15-band.
In the end this is what I did. I bought Beyer Ribbon M-500 mics for primary vocals and Beyer 400 dynamic for backup vocals for a bar band like yours.
Though it may look too expensive a solution, it solves a bunch of problems while using the Live Sound Maxim “Fix it at the source”.
In the end you will most likely need to buy 1/3rd Oct EQ.
Something to keep in mind with all graphic EQs.
The graphic EQs are supposed to “draw you a picture” of what the EQ is doing.
This is TOTALLY WRONG! They are lying to you.
Use a RTA. There are several free ones around that run on laptops.
Try this one-
www.libinst.comDownload the program Praxis and install the free demo version.
Unhook the EQ from the rest of the system.
Praxis in the free demo version will generate pink noise and it will measure with its RTA.
One thing you must remember is that when you feed the signal back into the laptop it goes into a soundcard.
This is set up to take microphone level or home audio (-20dB) and you are going to feed it line level (+4dB). This may be dangerous.
The totally safe thing is to put a high value (10k ohms) resistor on the hot wire going from the output of the EQ back into the laptop sound card IN.
Other than that you can cut down the gain on the EQ, IF it has a master gain adjustment.
I like the resistor.
The whole reason for this is for you to see what happens when you cut two EQ faders that are next to each other. See what kind of hole it digs compared to the picture you see on the front of your “graphic” EQ.
You will be shocked how badly it chops things up along with how much gain you have lost. Since we are using an RTA that can not measure Phase you can not see how bad that is screwed around, though the result does show up as gain loss when two faders are cut near or next to each other.
I strongly suggest you do this test so you can see how bad things get with a minor cut of EQ, never mind pulling all the faders down near the bottom.
Make up some y-cords so you can monitor the EQ during setup and during the show.
Have a Merry Christmas,
Too Tall
