"I did a gig in Bristol where they had been struggling with their monitors. The graphic looked as though someone had fallen over and pulled the faders with them. I had a listen to the monitors and they didn't sound very good, so I flattened the graphic and listened to the boxes flat. They were bi-amped, so I asked the house engineer to turn the high end down a couple of clicks on the amp. He asked if he should do it on the crossover, but I said 'no, on the amp'. We turned the amp down a little bit and the monitors sounded a lot better; a little bit of EQ and they sounded great! When you turn a crossover down, it turns down, say, 2dB of the crossover, but then if it then goes into the amplifier and the amplifier is too big, turning the crossover down 2dB in proportion to what it's going to amplify is a meaningless action. Turn the amplifier down. Quite often especially on monitors, the amplifiers are far too loud for the high end. In places where people don't have enough experience, all that is needed is someone to take things back to basics. If you find yourself hacking away with a graphic EQ, the problem is rooted somewhere else in the chain."
