To EQ Or Not To EQ?

At the present time I have no equalization fitted to the monitoring system, nor plans to fit any. My general experience has been that flattening the response curves of loudspeakers in rooms with EQ yields audio that sounds different but not necessarily better than unequalized audio except in extreme cases, and that yields mixes that travel a little less well to other systems. I've come to prefer coping with the obvious response anomalies presented by speakers (could somebody please pass the Kleenex?) over coping with the imaging anomalies created by equalizers.

Levels For The Playing Field

I'm pretty well set in my ways regarding levels. I use 90 dB SPL as a reference for 0 VU, both channels running, using pink noise. However, this room is so quiet that I've found myself happily dropping by 10 dB for critical listening (I've done no mixing here yet). Just for the hell of it, I spent a morning seriously listening at 60 dB SPL, which is really quite soft. As the room is quiet down to around 10 dB SPL in the mid and high frequencies, I figure I still had 50 dB signal-to-noise ratio at that level! Once I got used to the spectral quality, the listening was extremely comfortable except that I couldn't as easily pick out all the edit points and transitions from one reverb program to another. After three hours of it, I found 80 dB SPL sounded horrendously loud! Interesting.

The point about this is that my faithful, long-standing 90 dB SPL reference level permits me to hear at least 30 dB down in pretty noisy control rooms. Here, I don't need that any more, and 80 dB SPL or even 70 dB SPL may turn out, with practice, to be entirely suitable, with greatly reduced hearing stress. We shall see, er, hear!