Equalization Tips Everybody knows you’re supposed to EQ (otherwise why would we put all those knobs there), but where to start? And what do the knobs really do? Simply, this is what an equalizer does – it takes our carefully designed ruler-fl at frequency response and mucks it up, boosting a frequency range here, lowering one there, all in the interest of making what comes out sound more musical than what went in, if not technically more accurate. Like many things audio, the concept of equaliza- tion came from The Telephone Company, who used equalizers to correct frequency response loss in hundreds of miles of telephone lines. Initially, equal-ization in the studio was used to correct defi ciencies — a mic or loudspeaker weak in high or low frequen-cy response could be made more “fl at” by the use of an equalizer. It’s only been in the last quarter century of multitrack recording that we’ve learned to use EQ as a creative tool, not just a corrective one.