SPOTLIGHT: EQs – Part II

We continue with our roundup on EQs, for this edition of Spotlight it’s time to get surgical AND to check out what could be some really good mastering plug-ins. First out is a classic.

Sonnox Oxford EQ & Filters

Everybody please welcome the ugliest contender in this issue of Spotlight! Thankfully an EQ plug-in should not be judged by it looks unless you’re a bimbo. Oh, and unless you’ve missed it, this is the former Sony Oxford EQ, they recently changed their name to Sonnox. The plug-in itself is based on the Oxford console EQ.

What we have here is basically a 5 band EQ with two filters, lots of knobs and a graph. Every band can be turned on and off. The low pass and the high pass filters have dip controls, it’s a pretty inconvenient solution though, as it’s just one button that can be set to six different positions. A menu or whatever would have made it a lot less clickier (see, there I go inventing words again).

Another downer is the lack of presets, there is in fact not a single one. I rarely use them myself on EQs, but I think it should be included in every plug-in. I might be hard on the Oxford EQ here, but there are, thankfully, positives which outweigh the negatives. For instance, four types of EQs (among them SSL types) which drastically changes the gain/Q dependency as well as overall control ranges, this alone makes the Oxford much more flexible than one might think at first. There’s also the ability to actually change the knob handling, a great feature in my opinion that lets you change between circular and linear motions.

All this aside, it’s biggest strength is how it actually works. You can do some minor adjustments on a drum bus and it will sound good, you can go pretty surgical with it and it will sound good. It sounds good as a channel EQ, it sounds good everywhere. After all it’s not a modern classic without a reason.

Sonnox

Roger Nichols Digital FREQUAL-IZER

If you have tried UNIQUEL-IZER from Roger Nichols, or read the last part of our Spotlight on EQs, then you might have a clue on what to expect from the FREQUAL-IZER. That’s right, something insanely flexible.

This EQ was designed with mastering in mind and it has a few amazing features for this. Most notably the “match” function which actually lets you analyze one signals EQ curve and then automatically match that one so your destination signal gets the same curves! Alright, a lot of fancy words, I’ll give you an example. Import Alice Coopers “Detroit City” on a stereo track in your session and solo it. Insert the FREQUAL-IZER on your master fader and set it to analyze the signal. Mute the stereo track with the Alice Cooper song, set the plug-in to analyze the rest of the song and bam! They’re matched! Very simple. You can then of course change the curves to better match your song. Oh, and talking about changing curves…

Remember that the UNIQUEL-IZER had unlimited bands? How do you go about taking that further? By introducing free-hand drawing! I got to say, when I first started out mixing I wondered why no EQ had this, so I was happy to see the FREQUAL-IZER have it. Basically the graph consists of a line made of a whole lot of dots. You can click and drag each and every one of these little dots to change the curve. To draw a complete curve like this would be very time consuming but the developers thought about this, so clicking and dragging above or beneath the line gives you freehand drawing. If you’re not a sketch artist there are three sliders that help you out once you’ve drawn the line: The smooth slider which of course smoothes out the curve, the curve scale slider which affects the gain, and the history slider which, yeah you’re damn right, gradually takes the curve back in time. Three very helpful sliders!

These two features alone, the match and the freehand drawing, makes the FREQUAL-IZER pretty wicked in my opinion, but there is more. The states slider is another impressive feature. Basically, at all times you’re working in “a state” (default is 1) but you can change the state and draw a new EQ curve in another state. There is room for 50(!) states and they’re easily scrolled through with the slider or with back and forward arrows.

There are more features but it’s too deep to go into so I’ll just mention that there are A-B preset system, channel linking and editing and inversion among other things. Since it induces a heavy amount of latency (which is actually displayed on the plug-in itself), it’s not suited for individual channel or aux use on a native system. But hey, it’s for mastering anyway. As you’d might expect, it’s a transparent EQ.

Roger Nichols Digital

Flux Epure

I’ve intended to review this plug-in by itself but I’m waiting for an upgrade which I’ve been told will be released. I thought since it is on the market, and there aren’t many reviews of it around I thought I’d give it a mention here as well though.

Flux is known for mastering, and especially for their flagship Solera+ which is insanely good. In fact, it’s the only product here on protoolerblog.com that have gotten the wicked approval so far. Like it’s dynamic brother, Epure looks very good, but more importantly, it has borrowed some features from Solera+ as well. If you’ve read the Solera+ review you know all about the A-B slider, which I personally think should be in every plug-in. It’s sort of wet-dry mix found on some others out there, but not exactly like it. Let me explain, on Epure you have two separate preset loaders with a whole lot of slots. So you can load two different presets, A-B them, and – do you see where this is going? – blend them! You will see this blend in real-time on the graph. The sad thing about Epure is that it unfortunately doesn’t come shipped with any presets, because of this cool blending feature it would be very nice if it did. As I’ve previously reported with Solera+, there’s a bug in this preset system. If you blend two presets, close the session and reopens it, the A-B slider will be set to full A but the controls themselves will be blended. It’s annoying but something that you can live with. If you desperately want the A-B slider in the right place, you’ll have to dial up the presets again and move it. But hey, why not just save it as a new preset and use that?

What else? It’s a five band EQ, you can choose filter type for all of them (low cut, low shelving, peak, high cut and high shelving) and you can turn them all on or off for quick A-B:ing. There’s also an inversion button which, well, inverts the EQ curve. Finally there’s buttons for doubling or halving the boost of all the bands. I should also mention that it has the highest gain capabilities here on the individual bands, up to +24, and thus also down to -24.

So it has a load of cool features, but does it sound good? Of course it does, it’s Flux. In the manual they’re talking about the best signal to noise ratio and how negative gain messes up the sound in other digital EQs and so on. I don’t know if this holds true, what I do know is that Epure sounds very good. When I compare it on a couple of different tracks with other EQs it’s often my first choice. It does seem to be heavier on the CPU than many other EQs though. This is something I don’t like on an EQ that I use on individual tracks, for busses I can deal with it, but not on individual tracks. However, taking into account what Solera+ is, Epure will probably be used as it’s tag-team partner for mastering by many, and this is in my opinion, a team that will be very hard to beat. Just make sure you got the cash to back it up though because they are pretty expensive.

Flux

Conclusion

The Roger Nichols Digital EQ again wins the award for innovation. I really enjoy seeing plug-ins like this that more or less breaks the limits of how you can build a certain type of thing. Sonnox Oxford EQ is the old classic in this Spotlight and it of course sounds very good on a lot of things. I do however think they should deal with the GUI because it feels primitive. I’m not talking about the colors or knobs, but mainly the dip controls that forces you to click so much. While Flux Epure has a great GUI, I hope they can make it more efficient on the CPU, alternatively that they can come out with a “channel version” of Epure because they’re really on to something here.

Spotlight on EQs part I
Spotlight on EQs part III
Spotlight on EQs part IV
Spotlight on EQs conclusion