You’ve likely done something most audiophiles don’t: embraced room correction. Maybe it was Dirac. Maybe REW into a miniDSP. Either way, the results might seem promising. Bass cleans up. A midrange valley smooths. That persistent upper edge finally settles down.
And yet... something else appears to vanish with each tweak. Stage depth seems to thin. Acoustic instruments feel a bit disembodied. Presence fades—not into noise, but into nothing. You’re tuning for balance, and the life keeps slipping out.
You could be EQ’ing your way around problems that never should’ve been there.
What to Do
Use EQ with a surgeon’s mindset—not a sculptor’s chisel. Start by fixing what should be fixed physically: speaker placement, listening distance, toe-in, early reflections, bass loading. Measure, yes—but measure to diagnose, not to justify. REW or Room EQ Wizard can help map the room’s behavior. Use it to find the modal peaks, not to build a digital bandage.
Then—only then—apply filters below about 200Hz. That’s where the room wins. Bass peaks caused by modal reinforcement can’t always be tuned out with positioning alone. This is where EQ helps—not by shaping sound, but by taming geometry.
Above that? Trust setup. Trust diffusion. Trust your ears.
Here’s Why That Works
Room correction can’t cancel a reflection. It can’t fix a tweeter firing too far off-axis. It doesn’t know if your speakers are pointing at your shoulders instead of your ears. When you use EQ to chase flaws in the mids or highs, you’re often just sanding down the signal itself. It robs transients of their edge. It blunts decay. It shrinks the space between notes—the space your system was supposed to open.
But done right—sparingly, thoughtfully—EQ can do what nothing else can. Clean up boom without touching bloom. Take just enough without giving away the rest.
Use EQ like seasoning. If you know exactly what’s missing, it might help bring it back. But if you’re adding it just because the numbers say so? You’re probably chasing ghosts—and trading away the soul of the system you already built.
