What are the frequency bands of the eq bars in the main iTunes display?

Question

What are the frequency bands of the eq bars in the main iTunes display?

The main iTunes dislay shows the song title and progress by default but if you click the little right-facing arrow on the left side of the display you can see a stereo eq display of 20 bands each for the left and right speakers but there's no label for what the frequency bands are.

The main equalizer that you can modify shows 10 band sliders of 32, 64, 125, 250, 500, 1K, 2K, 4K, 8K, and 16K Hertz (logarithmic). I was thinking that maybe the 20 bands in the main display represent the range between 32Hz and 16KHz but it's difficult to tell for sure. Does anyone know what those bands are?

Thanks,
Rene

Windows XP Pro

Posted on Mar 22, 2006 11:07 AM

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Answer 1

Otto42

Level 6

9,070 points

Mar 22, 2006 12:22 PM in response to rene.sandiego

I don't know, but if you're interested, the actual frequencies used in the sliders are 32Hz, 64Hz, 128Hz, 256Hz, 512Hz, 1024Hz, 2048Hz, 4096Hz, 8192Hz, and 16384Hz. 🙂

You could find out though. Grab an audio program like Audacity, and use the tone generator to create some WAVs with various frequencies. Then play 'em in iTunes and see what you get.

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Answer 2

Mar 22, 2006 3:26 PM in response to Otto42

Thanks for the tip in using Audacity. I made some test sine wave tones at 32, 64, 128 Hz etc. saved it as a .wav file and ran it in iTunes with the eq bands showing. This is what I found:

< 250 Hz = band #1
250 Hz = band #2
500 Hz = band #3
1 KHz = bands #8
2 KHz = bands #10-11
4 KHz = bands #15-16
8 KHz = band #20

The bands mentioned are the peak bands with other bands tapering off in value from either side. Based on this simple test I can't see a numerical pattern to the bands (linear, logarithmic, etc). There's a wide gap between 500Hz and 1KHz but a real narrow gap between 1KHz and 2KHz. Oh well. I might make a few other tones and fill in a couple of the bigger gaps. I'll post the results here.

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Answer 3

Mar 22, 2006 3:41 PM in response to rene.sandiego

So I made a few more test tones and here's what I found:

875 Hz = bands #5-6
900 Hz = bands #5-6, 8 (weird one)
950 Hz = band #5 (another weird one)
1.5 KHz = band #9
2.5 KHz = band #12
3.0 KHz = bands #13-14
3.5 KHz = bands #14-15
4.0 KHz = bands #15-16
6.0 KHz = band #18
7.0 KHz = band #19

That pretty much covers the bands. The 900 range is odd but other than that it seems fairly consistent.

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