Can I Use EQ To Stop Rattling? How Will It Affect the Sound?
You’ve got a rattle in your room. You’ve done all the tests and you know exactly what is causing it. What do you do next? Can you use EQ to stop the rattling in your room? Should you? How will it affect the sound of your system? Let’s discuss!
How You Got Here
Let’s set the scene. You were probably watching a movie at a fairly high volume and noticed a very disturbing sound. After trying all the usual fixes, you figured out it is something that you can’t easily fix. Often it is a window or light fixture. No matter the cause, the fix is far more money than you want to spend. Next, you ran a bass sweep and identified the exact frequencies that were causing the rattle. Now you know the cause, but can’t really do anything to stop the rattle. Even at lower volumes, the rattle happens. This has you thinking about stopping the rattling with EQ.
Will It Work?
EQ can be used to fix a rattle in your room. The concept is easy enough to grasp. If certain sounds are causing something in your room to rattle, you can set your EQ so that it eliminates those frequencies. For those that have never used an EQ before, there are two settings: The frequency and the “Q” value. The “Q” value is the number of frequencies around the specified frequency that will be affected. A low Q value means that more frequencies will be affected (think of a hill rather than a sharp peak). A high Q value means that very few frequencies will be affected. If you know that one (or a few) frequencies are causing the rattling, you can set your EQ to stop just these specific frequencies by setting the Q value very high. This will eliminate just the offending frequencies.
How Will It Affect the Sound in Your System?
The concern most people have is that eliminating specific frequencies will cause “holes” in their sound. This is, by definition, true. You’ve used your EQ to eliminate very specific frequencies to stop the rattling in your room. But that’s the wrong concern. What you should be worried about is if eliminating those frequencies will be audible. If you play a sweep, you’ll certainly notice that those frequencies are missing. During normal content, however, that is much less likely. Even if you did notice the missing frequencies occasionally, certainly that is better than all the rattling you were hearing before.
Have you used EQ to eliminate rattling in your room? Let us know how it worked out in the comments below!
