>I have some Mid to High-end equipment. Parasound Halo P3 Preamp/CAL Audio Labs CL-15 CD Player/2 Parasound HCA 1200 amps (Mono)/Apogee Centaur Major Speakers. I was thinking of adding a Graphic Equalizer. I guess my question is: Should I do this or am I going to mess up the sound of my system? I feel I am missing something or maybe my hearing is going the older I get.

Unskilled use of a graphic eq will definately mess up the sound of your system. Furhtermore the learning curve for proper use of an Eq can be lenghthy.

Finally there is a school of thought that says that parametric eqs are better. However, they generally have an even longer learning curve.

If you are looking for a good eq for a good price, check out Rane equalizers. They ain't cheap and they ain't crappy.

An Equalizer will not 'mess' up the 'sound' of a system and is not that difficult to use. They are quite simply tone controls .

A great way to experiment with equalization (and a number of other interesting audio effects) is to use a computer as your source (with losslessly ripped audio files in a format like FLAC, generated by the free program EAC) with a music playback program like Foobar2000 (which is also free). Be careful...you may never go back to that old fashioned CD player when you grow accustomed to the power, convenience, and error-free peace-of-mind of computer-as-source.

There is no a simple answer to that question. Depends on what you are trying to do. If you want to use it as a tone control use a tone control. If you want to use them to "fix" the room it generally won't work. Why do you think an EQ would help things?

You could add a digital equilizer like the Benringer DEQ2496. Therefore, any equilisation remains purely in the digital domain.

It's good value for money. However, this would require you to have an outboard DAC and this method has its own problems in the form of jitter. There are some dedicated jitter reduction clocks out there but that will mean yet another purchase!

Hi,
Bought a Crate Pro Audio Dual 31 band graphic equalizer to add to my stereo system to present a cleaner sound for some old audio tapes on CD that our not too legible(heavy base). Can I just add the equalizer onto my Sony CD system? I have an old macintosh system also I could use with a nakamici cd player. Thankx. Larry...