Hello
I recently got a Denon Reciever/Amplifier. One of its feature is something called Dynamic EQ. What this does is compensate for the way that the human brain hears different frequencies at different levels. Eg when volume is quiet, bass and highs roll off and mids are pronounced. When music is loud, Bass and Highs are heard louder and mids are reduced. This is a psychoacoustic thing and happens in our physiology not actually anything that happens physically to the sound wave.
This hearing response is represented by a specification/standard called ISO 226 and also known as The Fletcher-Munson curves based on a study done to measure the perceived volume of frequencies at different levels.
So...... this brings me to my proposal for Helix (in my case I have a Helix LT).
I use my helix as my PC sound card as well (so that I have high quality output to my monitors and can also play guitar that is mixed with the output which is is a very nice thign to have).
What I would like is exactly what the denon has which is a compensation curve that is tied to the hardware volume knob of the helix. I don't know if its possible to 'read back' the volume level into the software but if that was possible, we could potentially have a global EQ applied to the output of the helix (including PC output) to apply the inverse ISO226 curve.
The result of this would be increased bass and highs at low volumes and increased mids at high volumes. In the middle would be flat.
This is actually a feature of some room correction monitoring/mixing softwares that are on the market. Would be a cool feature to have on the helix built in. I imagine that it would be semi trivial to implement ( as long as the hardware volume knob level is readable).
Failing that, a manual 'loudness EQ' might be doable? This is actually something that used to ship on a lot of old classic stereo integrated audiophile amplifiers. The downside of that is that it would be a manual tweak each time you change volume to balance it out and I imagine that non technical users would be confused by it and maybe even make their sound worse if they don't know what they are doing.
The other hurdle is that with the Denon feature, it uses a calibration microphone to measure the speaker level to set the right 'reference level' for how much correction to apply. I think with the HELIX, that wouldn't be feasible to it might have to be a manually set reference level (or pick some value of the volume knob which is like 65% or something that approximates the 85SPL standard where the frequency response would be flat and use that as the centre point (and hope that speakers are set appropriately as well).
I'm keen to hear people's opinion on this. It is an amazing feature that makes speakers sound great at low (and all) volumes and would be great as a PC processing effect (or even as a manual EQ just for guitar after the Cab IR).
