AutoEq's New Parametric EQ Optimizer

AutoEq just got a new and improved parametric eq optimizer.

AutoEq is, as many of you already know, a project for headphone equalizer presets and a tool for creating these automatically. While all major types of equalizers have been supported a long time now, including parametric equalizers, the optimizer which finds the best parameters for the parametric eq was slow and produced problems in certain rare(ish) cases.

The new parametric eq optimizer runs a lot faster, supports low and high shelf filters and has limits for filter (band) center frequencies, gains and qualities (widths). Together with the recent addition of multiprocessing, the new version generates the results over 100x faster and the speedup for a single optimization run is around 10x. The low and high shelf filters make it easier to adjust the bass and upper treble levels in your eq app. This is especially useful as the preferred levels for both vary wildly from one listener to another. And finally the limits on the filter parameters ensure that there won't be values produced which you cannot add to your eq app.

I put quite a lot of effort into ensuring the new optimizer is robust but this is still the first time the new results have been released out there in the wild so please let me know if you find something wrong/odd/funny/weird.

Here's an illustration of how the parametric eq optimizer finds the best filter parameters

https://i.redd.it/gdv4037xhno91.gif

Hope you enjoy!