Softube AAX DSP, User Manual, Page: 54 / 182

54 | FOCUSING EQUALIZER
borrow it for a while!” We fell instantly in love with
the sound, and when we put it inside the Focus-
ing Equalizer we immediately got what we had
been looking for. One drawback with the Neumann
is that it isn’t very sharp, and sometimes difficult to
use to really control and shape the sound. One of
the runner-up equalizers we tried was the Filtek,
but we didn’t really want to model it because of the
extreme complexity. Eventually (and with some
persuasion from our testers) we realized that the
Filtek was exactly the counterpart to the Neumann
that was needed for the Focusing Equalizer and
the Passive-Active Pack.
What Is Unique About the Focusing
Equalizer?
The combination of three bands that automatically
follows the high and low cuts. So if you set your low
cut at 2 kHz, the low band will automatically get a
center frequency at or above 2 kHz. The mid band
will have its center frequency somewhere between
the high and low cut. Sounds easy enough?
The graph below shows two settings, using the
active filter type. Low and High Bands are on
full boost, and Mid Band on full cut. The difference
between red and green graph is the settings of the
Low and High Cuts, 50 Hz-12 kHz (green) and
200 Hz-10kHz (red), respectively. As you can see,
the mid dip follows the settings of the cuts.
The Trio (“Passive-Active Pack”)
The Focusing Equalizer is a part of a trio
together with the Passive Equalizer and the
Active Equalizer. The Pas sive and Ac t ive
have very diff erent sounds, wh ile this unit combines
the se two into a new type of equalizer with a cla ssic
sound. We can as s ure you that there are no other
equalizer plug-ins that sound like these.
At a first glance, you will notice that these three
units don’t look like your average equalizer, and at
a closer inspection you’ll see that the knobs behave
in a peculiar way. This is because we have chosen to
keep the way the original units worked, and while it
feels quirky in the beginning you will get used to it
pretty fast.
The Story
The Focusing Equalizer was actually the main
goal of this project. We have had the idea for a long
time, and we developed prototype after prototype to
try the concept. It sounded good, but we had a hard
time getting the right character. While showing it
to one of our main dealers in Stockholm he asked
us what kind of filters we used and why we didn’t
model a great sounding passive equalizer and put
that inside the Focusing Equalizer instead of
the off-the-shelf EQ algorithm we used in the pro-
totype. At the store he had tons of equalizers and
we listened to almost all of them, not really satis-
fied with what we heard. At the end of the visit he
brings this Neu-
mann and says,
“Oh, I almost
forgot this one.
We had it here
for some repara-
tions, but the
customer won’t
notice if you
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