Using the 10-band equaliser well

Ten sliders, and a strong temptation to push them all up. Here is what each region actually does for a film.

What the bands cover

The lowest bands are rumble and bass — explosions and music foundation. The middle is where speech lives, and where most film problems are. The top is detail and air: rain, cloth, room tone.

Shaping it for dialogue

If speech is buried, a modest lift in the middle does more than raising the volume ever will, and it does not bring the effects up with it. A small cut in the lowest bands helps too, because heavy bass masks speech.

Presets and restraint

Ready-made curves suit particular material — film, music, voice — and are a better starting point than a flat guess. Small moves work; large ones make everything sound processed. Flatten resets the lot.

Match the curve to what you are listening on

A setting that transforms laptop speakers will sound wrong on headphones, because the two have opposite weaknesses. Laptop speakers produce almost no bass, so cutting the lowest bands and lifting the middle clears space for speech. Headphones reproduce everything already, so heavy adjustment sounds processed — small moves are enough. Settings are remembered per file, so set up for whatever you use most.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Raising every slider. It does nothing except make the whole thing louder and more likely to distort, since the relationship between the bands is unchanged — and it is the relationship that shapes the sound. If something needs to stand out, reduce what is competing with it rather than boosting it further. A film with muddy dialogue usually improves more from a small cut in the bass than from any amount of added mid-range.

When the equaliser is the wrong tool

If speech is quiet relative to the effects rather than tonally wrong, dialogue boost does the job better because it targets speech specifically. If the problem is that loud scenes are startling, loudness levelling is the right control. Both of those are Pro tools; the equaliser itself is free. The equaliser shapes tone; it does not narrow the gap between whispers and explosions.