right.
so, a compressed audio file (an mp3) reduces it's size by throwing away information on the high and low end. running that through an eq that exaggerates the low and high end can compensate for this mildly. it's not as good as an uncompressed source through a flat eq, but it's better than a compressed file through a flat eq. but, when you put an uncompressed file through an eq designed to compensate for compression loss, it's going to sound absurd.
there's actually been a change in mixing philosophy recently, where producers in certain genres are mixing their records to sound optimally through compression, throwing all kinds of wrenches in the whole thing...
at the end of the day, you're right: there's an eq in foobar and there's probably an eq on your mp3 player, but not all eqs are created equally (the one in my sansa is kind of weak and was not able to boost the lows as powerfully as my bass boost headphones were).
ExpensiveGarbage
Soooo..... you're just sitting here having a conversation with yourself?
deathtokoalas
the truth is we're all really conversing with ourselves.
ExpensiveGarbage
Yes, this is I can agree with.
ImActuallyABanana
well what you have to understand is that when an mp3 "throws away" information in the highs and lows, that information is gone. Beats audio exaggerating the lows and highs isnt exactly a good things. Beats audio is boosting the severed highs and lows... its not adding, its boosting.. so basically, your boosting highs and lows that sounds like crap.. you get me ?
deathtokoalas
if you look at the response on the phones, it actually cuts the lowest registers and boosts around 100. this is consistent with an "mp3 bass boost". i have a pair of sennheisers that does the same thing, but it's marketed as "bass boost for mp3 response".
what an mp3 throws away is mostly outside the audible range, but it sort of bleeds over into the audible range in various ways. i don't have the numbers off hand, but it's not going to cut at 100. it'll highpass around 20 or something and then slowly reduce the information up to around 50 iirc. so you want that cut down bottom to cut out the noise, and then the boost a little higher to exaggerate the lost lows.
so, no. you can't boost information that is gone. it's just gone. it's not boosting a "severed" high or low. what's lost is lost. what's is doing is exaggerating what still exists in order to compensate.
it's not some kind of magical de-mp3 uncompression algorithm or something, it's really essentially a trick. but if they're anything like my sennheisers, it's a trick that works.
stated another way, you can mangle the signal under 50 and boost at 100 and get the effect of reconstructed bass, even though it's not what's actually happening.
if you're listening to really deep bass, you'll possibly be able to tell. but the average bass range is simply not that low. you're getting overtones and murkiness on the bottom. the overtones are gone, they can't be reclaimed, but you can fudge it by boosting a little higher.
i doubt the phones have them, but a little reverb box might be able to reconstruct a bit of those overtones. you'd be fighting with purists, though. fuck, i'd fight with you over that...
ImActuallyABanana
thats mostly what i said.. if you ever listen to an mp3, you can clearly hear that isnt not just the unheard frequencies being gone.. if that was the case, then mp3s would sounds great.. but its not. mp3s sound like shit in general no matter what bitrate they are. they lose alot of the frequencies that matter as well and with those frequencies completley gone, boosting the highs and lows will do absolutley nothing for sound quality
deathtokoalas
obviously, you can't make an mp3 sound like a flac by using an eq. that's not what i was saying. but, you can make an mp3 sound "punchier" by boosting the bass, and it will sound better to most people.
you can try it yourself. find a wave editor. i still use a copy of cool edit i "found" somewhere back in about 1998, but i think the standard free tool to do this nowadays is audacity. rip a cd to wav. pick something that's not deep bass music. then, run it through a high pass filter around 20 hz. you'll immediately notice that the rumble is gone, but that the track doesn't sound particularly different. then put it through a parametric eq that slopes from -50% at 20 to +50% at 100 and then back down again to 0 around 150. you'll immediately notice that it's punchier than the file that's just cut at 20, even though it's missing the subbass.
it's not a perfect comparison because the mp3 is losing some information up to about 50 (iirc). but it gets the point across.
ImActuallyABanana
ive done this alot and i can honestly say that to me, being in audio for 6+ years, i have never heard an mp3 sound even slightly better with any type of eq... its like compressing distortion, no difference. in reality your just turning up Crap. Ive had to take mp3 samples of things and put them in a new song (24bit/44.1k) and when you blend in that mp3 well in there, thats when an mp3 is tolerable. but yes your right, to some people(meaning regular consumers), boosting those frequencies on an mp3 would sound better. to them. not to us of course. i just hate mp3s in reality.
Randy Parsons
The compression rate has a lot to do with it. Unless you use a really bad compression people simply can't tell the difference between compressed and uncompressed. Even so called audiophiles. They have done studies, although they are kinda hard to find with Google. As for EQ. EQ to the room or to your 10$ earbuds or whatever makes it sound good to you. Beats certainly didn't invent the EQ. Many cheap earbuds have pretty horrible bass. I would always prefer to EQ myself instead of some 'preset' that Apple and Beats does. Not sure if Apple still does this on their ipods.
deathtokoalas
for those that are curious, the highpass (sort of.) does occur after the fourier transform (for the lowest frequencies), but this isn't the right place to get into the mathematics of the issue and such a pedantic discussion does nothing to address my argument. if you want to look into this, though, understanding the way the waveform is split in encoding will help you understand why more information is lost at 40 hz than at 100 hz and why there's still enough of the signal around 100 hz to boost for the signal loss in the subbass. i don't think i implied that mp3s literally highpass, and i apologize if you've misread me in that way.
fwiw, i wrote the following piece of music using wavelet and fourier transforms in partial requirement of a graduate level course in mathematics on data compression algorithms:
