When your Helix / FRFR isn’t quite as flat as you believed

normula1

I have a Helix rack connected to a Hughes and Kettner 2*12 fitted with Celestion F12-X200 speakers via a stereo power amp. I’ve never been particularly been happy with the sound… there’s always been something “off”.
I didn’t like the sound even with regular guitar speakers either although in ears sound brilliant.

I started messing with the global EQ the other day and had a thought… I played some white and pink noise through the system with a spectrum analyser app listening in. It showed a small peak around 2k. I used the global EQ to pull it down and lo and behold all the weirdness was gone, and it finally sounded great. To prove the point, I connected my TC G-Major2 in between and used its EQ with exactly the same result.

TimmyO

FRFR should stand for Full-ish Range Flat-ish Response  

Sporky

That speaker has a bit of a dip at 5.5kHz, and is a bit "lumpy" between 1kHz and 5kHz. There's a lump around 2kHz but not as big as the dip at 5.5lHz.

I'm wondering if the cab is doing something at 2kHz.

Roland

None of them are flat. For a while I was using Matrix Q12 on output 1, and Mackie SRM450 mk1s on output 2, with an EQ to bring the Q12 close to what I was hearing through the Mackies. We’ve now switched to SRM450 mk2s, and I’ve removed the EQ because there’s not as much difference (they’re both too bright at the top end).

On a related issue, last week I spent over an hour trying to dial out an annoying 3.6kHz ringing. It turns out that my hearing aids were on the speech setting, rather than the music setting. 

maltingsaudio

The problem isn’t with the kit it’s your ears. Every one hears differently and the noises we hear either appeal or don’t broadly speaking, and that appeal differs from person to person and race to race.

To produce a system with a totally flat response is technically unachievable mostly to to mechanics, the movement and inertia of the coil , and couple this with the way the air moves infront and behind of the speaker in a cabinet and you can get an idea of why. That’s not to say they don’t get very close. But it’s the imperfections, and how our ears react to them, which make the sound pleasing ,or not. 

From our point of view, it’s being able to hear which frequencies are disharmonious and having the tools to adjust them , which is the answer. Coupled with the blind belief that ,what we think is the perfect sound, or should I call it tone, is what everyone else will agree with. Bear in mind , the overall sound at most bigger gigs is decided by the one bloke behind the mixing desk, the sound of a recording decided by a committtee!

A useful tool to help with this is this: https://sft.sourceforge.net/