AUD · Audio tools

10-Band Graphic Equalizer

Continue editing Open in workflow
Often followed by + Limiter + Compressor + Gain

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Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Ten octave bands

Each slider drives a peaking filter centred on a fixed frequency: 31, 63, 125, 250, 500 Hz, then 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 kHz. Every step is a doubling, which is what makes the spacing feel even to the ear rather than even in hertz.

Range is ±12 dB per band. The bands are one octave wide, so their skirts overlap and a move on one is felt by its neighbours.

What lives where

  • 31 and 63 Hz. Sub weight. Felt more than heard, and absent from laptop and phone speakers entirely.
  • 125 and 250 Hz. Bass and the body of a voice. Cuts here clear up a muddy recording faster than boosts anywhere else.
  • 500 Hz and 1 kHz. The middle. Too much reads as boxy or nasal, too little as scooped and distant.
  • 2 and 4 kHz. Consonants, attack, and presence. This is where speech becomes intelligible on a small speaker.
  • 8 and 16 kHz. Sibilance and air. Boosts here raise hiss and encoder artifacts along with the detail.

Cut before you boost

Boosting the band you want and boosting everything around it are indistinguishable to the ear, because loudness reads as improvement. Cutting the bands you do not want, then raising the output afterwards, gets to the same balance without stacking gain.

When boosts are the right answer, the preamp keeps them safe. Ten bands at +6 dB with the preamp at 0 will clip almost any commercial master on export.

Fixed bands vs sweepable ones

A graphic EQ is quick because there is nothing to choose but level. That is also its limit: a resonance at 3.2 kHz has to be treated with a 2 kHz or 4 kHz band, and both take more of the surrounding spectrum with them than the problem needs.

For a narrow, exact move, the three-band equalizer has a sweepable bell with an adjustable width that reaches Q 8. Use this page for shaping and that one for surgery.

Frequently Asked Questions

It splits the frequency range into fixed bands and gives each one a gain slider. It reads WAV, MP3, M4A, AAC, Ogg, Opus, FLAC, AIFF, and WebM audio, and exports in the format the source arrived in.

They are the ISO octave centres, each one double the last, starting at 31.5 Hz and ending at 16 kHz. Hardware graphic EQs have used the same set since the 1970s, so a setting described in one place means the same thing here.

The three-band tool has two shelves and one sweepable bell, so you choose the frequencies. This one has ten fixed bands and you choose only the gains. Fixed bands are faster to work with; sweepable ones are more exact.

Boosts add energy, and several at once can push a file into clipping on export. The preamp drops the whole signal before the bands run, which buys back the headroom. As a rule, set it to minus the largest boost.

Each band is one octave wide at its half-power points and the skirts extend past that, so neighbours overlap. Two adjacent bands at +12 dB reach roughly +16 dB where they meet.

No. With every slider at 0 dB and the preamp at 0, the samples are copied through untouched.

A filter cannot be centred above half the sample rate. At 22.05 kHz the 16 kHz band is too close to the limit to be built, so it passes through instead of ringing. It also does nothing on a source whose content already rolls off below 16 kHz, which is true of most low-bitrate MP3s.

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