[?] bass rattle with car, not headphones?

[irrationallikepi]

Hello.

First off, what an awesome app! I love it! I'm having an issue. I have set the equalizer just right where with my beats wireless bluetooth headphones, all my song tracks sound perfect to me:

low band gain 3.2
mid1 band gain -.99
mid2 band gain -.25
high band gain 0
low band cutoff 80
low band slope 1.4
mid1 band center freq 1000
mid1 band width 1.250
mid2 band center freq 4500
mid2 band width 2.0
high band cutoff freq 7500
high band slope 2.712

But, in my 09 Nissan Altima, I'm getting quite a bit of bass distortion at louder levels. It appears to be related to the loose headliner in the back of the car and the speakers/wires rattling. I had someone hold their hand up to the loose headliner while playing heavy bass music at louder levels. It seemed to help quite a bit. I haven't yet worked out how to fix this with the dealer (if they will, and it may be expensive).

One note: for my headphones, Neutron never auto-adjusts gain due to overloaded sound but always seems to for heavy bass songs in my car.

What I want to know is: can I workaround rattling bass frequencies in Neutron? With my settings above, they sound great everywhere (even my wife's car) except in my car. I've even tried setting low band slope to say 6 to try and focus on only applying bass gain to a smaller set of frequencies, hopefully avoiding the culprit frequency range.

Can someone please point me to potentially finding what the culprit frequency (frequencies) could be? Should I set the low mid center frequency to be much lower in a bass range, that way one of the two (low band, mid) can be a notch filter where I apply a cut and the other a gain? My presets above sound great to me for the mid / high in that I get unmuddied, isolated vocals, cymbals, etc

I'm a drummer, and so my goal is for my bass to have a nice "punch/kick" to it as if kicking at the pedal without any rumble/rattle/vibration.

BTW, here's my config:

Galaxy S3 (SGH-T999)
Android 4.4.2 (CyanogenMod 11 nightly latest as of today)
Stock Kernel (tried others, didn't help)

Thanks for your help!

irrationallikepi

[dmitrykos]

> getting quite a bit of bass distortion at louder levels

It is due to overloaded audio because most of commercial music is normalized and you set Low Band to +3.2 dB. It will likely cause overloading. To avoid that you need either:
1) Normalize tracks
or
2) adjust Preamp gain to lower value
or
3) modify EQ gains in substractive manner, e.g.:

low band gain 0 (was 3.2)
mid1 band gain -4.1 (was -.99)
mid2 band gain -3.45 (was -.25)
high band gain -3.2 (was 0)

e.g. substract loudest band's gain which is 3.2.

Dmitry.

[irrationallikepi]

Thank you for the fast reply! I will do this. BTW I just had dynamat placed in the headliner under the unit. The rattling in the car now is gone. I still have a little muddiness so of course will try your tip.

[irrationallikepi]

BTW I'm still a little confused about normalization. It doesn't seem to help in my case but make the quality sound not as good. With your tips provided should I first set the EQ as you said then apply normalization all in one shot on the entire song folder in "Albums" (that's what I did before)? I read elsewhere on this forum about normalization and I'm still a little fuzzy. I have hundreds of albums so it would be tedious for me to kick off normalization separately on each album

[dmitrykos]

If you go for option 3) then normalization is not necessary as you will not amplify frequencies but just cust them but normalization can help increasing fidelity if some frequency are cut too much and there is numeric space to fill.

To normalize all albums at once just long press on top level entry Albums -> NORMALIZE -> select all tracks with (+) and confirm. Normalization process is then can be seen through Settings -> Normalization.

Also, overloading could be caused by Reset Gain value being set above 0: check it and reset to 0 if it is above from Settings -> Automatic Gain Protection.

[irrationallikepi]

You rock! The subtractive method 3 is what I needed. I get strong, nice, crisp thump now with good isolation in the frequency range where things don't sound muddy and overlapping.

Thanks again Dmitry! This is great software and great customer service