Room EQ Advisor
This room EQ advisor plays pink noise, measures your room’s response at the listening seat, and returns parametric EQ cut suggestions (frequency, gain, Q) for the peaks — with a before/after simulation and an honest call on which problems EQ can fix and which need treatment.
ℹ This is an advisor, not a real-time corrector — you apply the filters in your own DAW/DSP (or a unit like miniDSP). It’s an uncalibrated measurement (speaker + room + mic, relative dB) at one seat, and EQ only helps there. Crucially it only cuts peaks and never boosts dips: a dip is usually a cancellation (null) that EQ can’t fill — boosting just wastes headroom. EQ tames modal peaks (roughly below 300 Hz) well; reflections and reverberation need physical treatment. The test tone plays through your speakers; the mic is analyzed live and never recorded.
How It Works
The tool plays pink noise through your speakers, measures the combined response at your listening seat, and removes pink’s natural tilt to give a relative response curve — similar in principle to an RTA (real-time analyzer), but averaged and processed for room correction advice rather than instant display. When you press Suggest EQ it finds the peaks — frequencies where the room is too loud — and turns each into a parametric cut: the centre frequency is the peak, the gain is enough to flatten it, and the Q is estimated from how wide the peak is (a narrow modal peak gets a high-Q surgical cut; a broad bump gets a gentle one). It then simulates the result by applying those peaking filters back to the measurement and drawing the corrected curve over the original, so you can see the peaks come down. Apply the listed settings in your DAW, plugin, or hardware DSP and re-measure to confirm. For quantitative work, dedicated measurement software such as REW (Room EQ Wizard) paired with a calibrated USB mic will go much further. For a deeper look at where those peaks actually originate, the room frequency analyzer overlays predicted axial standing-wave frequencies so you can see which modal peaks are dimensional.
The most important thing this tool does is tell you what not to EQ. A dip in the response is almost always an acoustic cancellation — two sound paths arriving out of phase at your seat — and you cannot fill it with EQ: boosting just pushes more energy into a null that swallows it, wasting amplifier and speaker headroom for no benefit. The fix for a dip is physical: move the seat, the speakers, or the subwoofer, or treat the boundary causing it. EQ also only works at one position and only really helps with low-frequency modal peaks (typically in the 30–300 Hz range); reflections, comb filtering, flutter echo, and reverberation in the mids and highs are jobs for absorption and diffusion, not filters. If you want to know how much low-frequency bass trap coverage you need to tame those modes physically, use the bass trap calculator before reaching for EQ. Cut, don’t boost; treat first, then EQ the residue; and trust a measurement over a graph.
When entering the suggested filters into your software or hardware, each band needs three numbers: the centre frequency (Fc in Hz), the gain (a negative dB value — it’s a cut), and the Q factor (or its reciprocal, bandwidth in octaves, depending on what your EQ calls it: bandwidth = 1/Q). Common destinations include parametric EQ plugins in a DAW, the four-band parametric EQ inside a miniDSP 2x4HD, Dirac Live’s manual-override filter slots, or the PEQ section of an AV receiver that supports manual parametric filters. If your hardware only offers shelving or graphic EQ, a parametric plugin inserted before your monitoring chain is the most practical alternative.