MAAT thEQred

Red Is The New Black

Think of thEQred as LP PEQ Red 2.0…we’ve taken the fundamentals of Algorithmix’s exemplary LinearPhase PEQ Red, and given it a MAAT makeover. There is no other æsthetic equalizer like thEQred. With its ability to invisibly provide spectral counterweight to mixes that lean one way or another, thEQred excels at straightening up biased content. Add crystalline air without stridency to a dark mix, or beef up lower mids and bass without bloat or loss of focus. With twelve bands or Sections of precision, linear phase parametric equalization featuring unique shelving filters, mastery of complex mixes without changing their overall sonic character is just a few clicks away.

A little backstory…An idea was born to reissue this masterpiece, along with the other legendary Algorithmix EQs, and make it available as 64 bit in all common formats and (finally!) for macOS. As a power user, our visionary Friedemann had some ideas in mind regarding the improvements. Specifically, he wanted to make the user interface, the UI, more flexible and faster to use because there is no other tool in the mastering chain that receives as much “seat time.” The result: Our thEQ UI and feature set. The UI affords super fast setup and includes a number of unique features which help to speed your work: The positive & negative Contribution function including absolute difference, the highly adjustable sonogram which makes detecting problem spots easy, and the possibility to play a note on the keyboard that you have in your head and then snap a Section to that respective frequency with one click. Also, having all twelve Sections visible simultaneously, not to mention the SORT button function.

Frequency Forward

thEQred works in the frequency domain. That is, the input signal is first transformed into a spectral representation. Then, that spectral equivalent is operated upon. Special measures have been taken to ensure high resolution at critical low frequencies while keeping temporal resolution untouched. Unlike common frequency-domain filters, our linear phase approach avoids drums or other instrument containing strong transients from being blurred. In addition, extremely high compute resolution has been used to avoid any cumulative truncation effects typical in complex frequency transforms. This results in unblemished sound quality.
There are other plug–ins on the market using frequency–domain techniques. Most of them apply relatively low frequency resolution and then claim that frequency response mathematically interpolated between a few set points or that freehand drawing is the best solution. This may be true for some industrial applications, but such filters simply don’t sound musical. We’ve worked hard to insure that filter shapes in thEQred exactly match the best analog references. The result is sonic quality that is undisputed, even at baseband 44.1 and 48 kHz rates.

Unobtrusive Power

“An equalizer should

have no, ideally, should have no distortion of its own. It’s almost impossible to do it without some distortion but, that’s the aim. So, if you can do that…Now there are a lot of equalizers about, where people have just taken a circuit out of some reference book and hoped for the best and they’ve never really succeeded because they haven’t taken into account all these other things.” — Rupert Neve on EQ in Rupert Neve: The SOS Interview on YouTube

thEQred was designed to deliver the highest possible linearity down to subsonic frequencies. This and other powerful features hide behind its clean and simple UI. Eye candy is great for newbies, but thEQr isn’t your typical filter: thEQred packs all the advanced features you need into one resizable window that’s easy on the eyes. Not only does the UI “get out of the way” so you can be more productive, we’ve incorporated industry–first features that speed your workflow, neatly packaged to make thEQred easy and intuitive to use.