Wow @mild pump milk that is a very thorough answer and I want to thank you this is extremely helpfull.
I had understdood (thanks to D.Gamble great manual for dualism) what the windowing was about for fft and the frequency spectrum and why you choose this size block or not according to do you want to see more the highs in detail, or the lows or the middle frequencies, etc....But I didn't, weirdly, understand at all how all that applies to the matter of the impulse response..... Thanks to your response, well now I do, so that's something!
It's really nice of you to tell me how you work and use this great eq according to the situation, honestly I've copied and pasted your response and I'm going to try the differents settings you suggested. Bu yes I agree : less is more, the good work must be done ahead so that the equing isn't too heavy and cause problem down the line.
I'de love to check those examples you're talking about to hear the differences bewteen the two types of phase responses...One can never be too informed. Thanks again for your help, I appreciate it greatly.

 

Thanks for the share.

 

Weird I can not get a free key to track contol.

 

Forget that had to log out and back in.

 

Yeah I had to do the same, probably because of the upgrade of the website.

 

Pro Tools Expert -TrackControl Overview

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Talmi,
also, for precise work with surgical very-narrow-Q resonant types you need higher IR length, for lows/mids/highs;
and, if you use for example 4096 resolution, it will work different with 44.1kHz and 192kHz. For higher sample-rates should be better to use higher ir length. If you use 1kHz sample-rate, you need very low IR length, because you don't need steps like 0.0001 Hz, you can work with 300 Hz or 301 Hz, not 300.0 Hz and 300.00005 Hz.
Imho, it is better to test, analyse, compare, listen by yourself and make judges.

 

Thanks for the added explanations. I agree I have to test the different setups to see what goes best.
I'm gonna do some benchmark having in mind the different elements you've underlined and I will try to find the best tweaks according to my configuration, the material at hand and my way to work.
Again @mild pump milk , I greatly appreciate that you take the time to share this knowledge, in such details, I have some testing to do, but at least now I have solid starting point and knowledge about wtf I'm doing when I change the different settings. Thanks man.
And good luck for your EP project, I hope it's moving forward as you like !

 

Huh, once I got equilibrium sounding not as eq, but as delay :D it was deep testing with using wrong settings such as zero latency analog mode or so, and I selected wrong padding, window function, so I got impulse with post ring, ending with pre ringing, it was shitty to hear signal echoing. By misunderstanding these things equilibrium can simply spoil the sound. But equilibrium is my "numba wan" go-to or equing.
And as I promised, week later I will upload files to hear that obvious difference between linear phase and very phase distorted one. Now have no time. And thanks for support with ep making, it will be bomb, if I recover 2 old projects from broken pc to finish the whole ep. Yeah, mastered with equilibrium etc)

 

Dave Gamble from DMG Audio answered on gearslutz, I found this in his Limitless thread, but people still asking him everywhere about how to use equilibrium and what is that advanced stuff for.
Dave Gamble:

There are no de-facto best settings for mastering. As a rule, I'd probably stick it in FIR mode with a Kaiser window (with the tuning at 0.5, which I set as default deliberately), with an IR length of 65536, in Free Phase mode, and maybe some padding if I was doing anything crazy. If your mastering is gentle, then these settings should be sane enough, and it'll be diminishing returns increasing from here.

Also, I would suggest using minimum phase for low frequency stuff and linear phase for mid and highs, which is achieved with Free Phase by having the control handles start at the bottom of the screen and end up in the middle.

If you have something a bit nasty to deal with, using higher settings should make your plight that little easier. The deal is that you can buy your way out of problems by spending CPU, and if you've used EQuilibrium for a while, you'll know what I'm talking about.

Specific answers:
FIR vs IIR - FIR allows you to dial-in the phase response, and give you a lot more control generally. For mastering, /try/ IIR, but 9 times out of 10 you'll likely end up FIR just because it gives you more to play with.

Phase - for mastering, start in Free. If you find you always prefer the sound with the bands in the middle, just use Linear. If you prefer the bands at the bottom, just use Analogue. If you prefer bands all over the place, stay in Free! (=me)

Window Shape - Kaiser all the way. Seriously, that guy did some very clever maths. Use it! It's parametric so you can play with it and get a feel for what it does. So, the window shape trades off between tightness in the time domain+ smoothness in the frequency domain vs slow decays in the time domain+sharp edges in the frequency domain. If you're notching something, you need the latter. If you're mastering, you most likely want the former. As you sweep the parameter around, you trade from one to the other. The other shapes do the same thing - they give you a specific balance between tight time-domain response and definition in the frequency domain. For high IR lengths, this stuff is all pretty subtle, so test it with a short IR. I included the full set of common window shapes, because it was easy, nice to be able to explore, and I suspected someone would ask at some point.

Padding - quite a fun trick this one. When it designs the filter, it will use a "virtual" IR length of padding * ir length (so, with padding x4 it'll design an impulse response four times as long). This dramatically reduces the (this is already too technical, I'm going to smudge language a bit) 'wrap-around' of the impulse response, because it gets unpacked into a bigger box. Then we take the part where all the action is, window /that/, and use that as the IR. So, you trade off spending CPU for computing the IR (which is every time you adjust the EQ) in exchange for a more accurate calculation of the IR.

 

Lol, yeah I confirm the wrong settings can completely mess up the sound you're working rather then helping...But thanks for the nice recipe for a delay, though, I appreciate it,.

And frankly I'm gonna sound geecky as hell but the advices from the man himself Dave Gamble and this whole topic with your own take on the matter should be a freaking sticky, period.
Anyone wanting the right advices for using the advance settings of equilibrium and not messing it all up should start here and he shall have everything he needs for just that.
I saw people ask a hundred times on Gearslutz what to do with those settings and I never saw the answer so far from Gamble so cheers for that, and he goes in great depth to explain it all, it's fantastic. Cheers mild pump milk.