How to EQ Dialogue for Video

EQ, or equalization, is the tool that shapes the tonal balance of your audio. For dialogue, that means cutting the frequencies that make voices sound muddy, boxy, or harsh, and boosting the ones that make them sound warm, clear, and present. It's one of the most important steps in any dialogue mix, and one of the most misunderstood.

Here's how to do it.

Start With Rumble and Hiss

Before touching anything in the midrange, clean up the extremes. Low-frequency rumble sits below 120 Hz and has no place in a dialogue recording. A low-cut filter sweeps it out before it muddies everything above it. On the high end, hiss and room noise lives above 10 kHz. A high-cut filter handles that.

These two moves cost you nothing in terms of voice quality. No voice lives below 80 Hz or above 10 kHz in any meaningful way. Cut them first, every time.

Cut the Mud and Nasal Frequencies

This is where most dialogue EQ problems actually live, and where most people get tripped up, because mud and nasal frequencies are easy to miss until you start cutting them.

Mud sits in the 400 Hz to 800 Hz range. It's the low-mid buildup that makes voices sound thick, indistinct, and hard to understand. Nasal sits higher, in the 2 kHz to 4 kHz range. It's the honky, pinched quality that makes a voice sound like it's coming through a phone. Together, these two frequency ranges are what make a voice sound boxy. Cut both of them and you'll understand immediately just how bad the recording actually was before you touched it.

Use a bell curve for both. Go easy — a few dB is usually enough. Sweep around within the range until you find the frequency that sounds worst, cut it, and move on.

Boost What the Voice Is Missing

Once the problematic frequencies are out of the way, add back what the voice needs.

A small low-shelf boost between 120 Hz and 240 Hz adds warmth, the body and weight that makes a voice sound full instead of thin. A high-shelf boost between 5 kHz and 7 kHz adds brightness and air, the quality that makes a voice feel open and detailed. Neither of these should be dramatic. You're enhancing what's already there, not compensating for a bad recording.

Last is presence. Intelligibility lives around 2.5 kHz, and a boost to that frequency with a wider bell curve will help any voice cut through the mix without raising the overall volume. If your dialogue is getting buried under music or sound effects, this is usually the fix.

Work in Order

Go through these steps in sequence: rumble and hiss first, mud and nasal cuts next, warmth and brightness boosts after, presence last. Each step sets up the one that follows. Boosting presence before cutting the mud means you're boosting on top of a problem instead of solving it.

This is the same workflow baked into Riot DQ, a dialogue EQ plugin built specifically for this process. Each of its seven bands covers exactly the frequency ranges described above, in the same order, with boost and cut controls limited so you can't accidentally overdo it. The goal is to walk you through this workflow band by band, which speeds up the process and helps train your ears at the same time. You still have to listen and make decisions. It just removes the guesswork about where to start. At $14.99 with no subscription, it's the most direct answer to the question of what EQ plugin to use for dialogue.

Trust Your Ears

Dialogue EQ isn't about hitting specific numbers. The frequency ranges above are starting points. Every voice is different, every room is different, and the right cut or boost in one recording might be completely wrong for the next one.

Learn what mud sounds like so you can hear it before you cut it. Learn what presence sounds like so you know when you've added enough. The technical side is learnable fast. The ear takes longer, but it's worth every hour you put into it.