- Publisher: MAAT
- Product: thEQorange
- Version: 2.1.0
- Format: VST, VST3, AAX
- Bit Depth: 32-bit and 64-bit
- Operating System: Windows
MAAT’s thEQorange is a linear phase EQ VST (Virtual Studio Technology) plugin for Windows. thEQorange runs as a VST, VST3, and an AAX plugin. thEQorange VST plugin can be used with all major digital audio workstations (DAW) including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Cubase, Pro Tools, and others.
A Dream Come True
Many mastering engineers, including MAAT founder Friedemann Tischmeyer, were fans of Algorithmix’s legendary original Linear Phase PEQ Orange. Unfortunately, the Algorithmix EQs were available only as 32-bit VSTs for PC and our workstations, and our industry has evolved since then. Tischmeyer’s students repeatedly asked for alternatives, which caused him to scan the marketplace for other high-class EQs. Colleague Bob Katz recommended EQuilibrium, an insanely versatile tool, which Tischmeyer used for teaching. However, he couldn’t find a satisfying alternative that might take the place of his original PEQ Orange.
The idea was born to reissue this masterpiece and make it available as 64 bit altogether common formats and for macOS. An agreement with Algorithmix was made, and MAAT started up in mid–2017. Algorithmix fans heard of that and reached bent us, saying “…just redo it because it is; no extras, no nothing. We just want to possess it back in 64 bit and for Mac.” That was encouraging. As an influence user, Tischmeyer had other ideas in mind regarding the UI. He wanted to form it more flexible and faster to use because there’s no other tool within the mastering chain an engineer spends such a lot setup time with.
The result? “I think we’ve achieved that. The UI allows super-fast setup and features a number of unique features which help to try to so: The positive & negative Contribution function including absolute difference, the adjustable sonogram which makes detecting energy spots you would like to wash up easy, and therefore the possibility to play a note on the piano you’ve got in your head and just push the respective frequency to the active band section with one right-click are just a couple of of the new features. What I prefer too is that I even have a summary of all Sections as against only one Section at a time.” so as to not find yourself with a weird Section order when using many filters, we also added the type button so your Sections are always in ascending order.
Unobtrusive Power
thEQorange’s powerful features hide behind its clean and straightforward UI. visual percept is great for newbies, but thEQo isn’t typical. It packs all the advanced features you would like into one resizable window that’s easy on the eyes. Not only does the UI “get out of the way” so you’ll be more productive, but we’ve also incorporated industry-first features that speed your workflow, neatly packaged to form thEQorange easy and intuitive to use. An example is that the ability to freely assign Sections to either stereo [left/right] or sum/difference [LR] at an equivalent time.
Subtle Functionality
We’ve brought pristine fidelity and innovative interface design to what wont to be an unremarkable product category. With four monitoring modes, an ergonomic and uncluttered interface, intelligent monitor auto–gain plus crazy good sound, you’ve needed to try thEQorange for yourself.
Better by Design
Whether you’re trying to find a surgically precise repair, colorless correction, or just baggage–free spectral contouring, our proprietary, precision algorithm delivers on the promise of linear phase correction. For pack up and control duties, bring the facility and purity of thEQorange in touch for all of your surgical equalizing tasks.
thEQorange Features:
thEQorange sounds more natural, organic, and open. Listen for the difference, it just sounds correct.
Details
- Exclusive Contribution Control™; positive addition only, negative addition only, EQ contribution only, and “normal” EQ out helps to aurally keep track of your progress
- Proprietary algorithms end in extremely low noise and vanishingly small-amplitude distortion
- Unique EQ design leads to no perceptible unwanted coloration with mixes (processing artifacts well below -100 dBFS) — work with clarity, transparency, and definition
- Equal delay in the least frequencies no matter filter settings, perfectly preserving the time relationship of harmonics within the original signal
- Operates at up to 384 kHz rate, suitable for top resolution audio (HRA), DSD or DXD production and post
- Extended resonant or center frequencies up to 174.14 kHz, for processing in ultrasonic and near ultrasonic for all HRA production and post
- 12 sections with 5 freely assignable parametric filter types; bell, low shelf, high shelf, low cut, and high cut
- 5 freely assignable Panorama modes; stereo, mono (sum), L-R (difference), left–only and right–only
- 80-bit internals (long double floats) virtually eliminate rounding errors
- Adjustable Q for the bell and high/low pass filters make musical adjustments easy
- The adjustable slope for shelving filters improve precision within the pass and stopbands
- Double the stopband attenuation (ripple) compared to other filter implementations
- Additional low and high pass filters are often overlapped to realize steep “brickwall” slopes
- Special oversampling for reduced aliasing when working with baseband (44.1 & 48 kHz) sample rates
- No coloration or amplitude bumps even at very low frequencies
- Optional inbuilt tone generator makes for quick location of trouble spots
- SORT function organizes active Sections in ascending order
- TUNE function aligns center frequencies to Western tunings
- Sections have Solo and FLIP to quickly find and address trouble spots
- Grid snap toggles between surgical and musical applications, emulating popular hardware resonant frequency choices, including Maselec and Manley
- True Peak metering to avoid overs
- AutoGain for effortless A/B comparisons
- Resizable frequency response display for straightforward, high precision adjustments
Extras
- Exclusive dual view, monochrome/color real-time spectrogram with user-adjustable temporal wiper allows you to choose “when” to transition to low clutter monochrome
- Choice of parametric editing via numerical fields or directly on the graphical display
- Complete setup exchange across multiple instances
Applications
thEQorange may be a highly specialized tool for mastering engineers who have access to diverse high-end EQs for various tasks. There are only a few forward/backward linear phase EQs on the market and thEQorange, with its wide, 80-bit double-precision processing and optimized–for–fidelity algorithm, will bring a replacement sense of transparency to your work.
With all the features and functionality of Algorithmix’s beloved original LP PEQ Orange, the feature-packed thEQorange brings such a lot more. Use its powerful processing and double-precision I/O for:
- Mastering and remastering tasks on complex, hi-fi mixes
- Equalizing of instrumental group stereo sub-mixes
- Clarifying the mid-band and rescuing dense mixes
- Addressing resonances and peaky instruments without tonal degradation
- Tight, transparent low shelf and presence boosts
- Removing unwanted ultrasonic content from HRA recordings
- Identifying resonances with ease when sweeping, thanks to the low inherent ringing
- Putting mixes with an excessive amount of DC or an excellent fat kick on a diet
- Tightening up loose or crowded mixes
All true linear phase EQs have similar specs. Dirac spikes and other artificial test signals will produce about an equivalent results in no matter whose product you are trying. A solo chime or kick drum track is additionally not what thEQorange was designed for…It excels at equalizing actual music!
What to not use thEQorange for is tracking or mixing! thEQorange may be a low channel count plugin, designed for the master bus and mastering. thanks to the insane complexity of the algorithm, thEQorange features a high CPU demand. it’s not a “light weight”!
My Go-To
Tischmeyer says: “The Algorithmix Orange was an important a part of my chain for quite 15 years. it had been my ‘to go’ tool once I needed to get rid of annoying frequencies and resonances or when the midrange was simply cluttered by too many events with an excessive amount of energy. an equivalent applies to our thEQorange. The magic of thEQo is that I can remove frequencies without having the texture that I even have applied a drastic EQ. I simply don’t hear the EQ. The result sounds natural, and suddenly the stereo image exposes — not as a side effect of the EQ but rather more as a result of creating space in order that everything falls into the proper place rather than fighting against one another. Furthermore, I exploit it as my preferred low move go. Yes, despite it’s being a linear phase EQ. Most mastering engineers wouldn’t do this due to the fear of pre-ringing artifacts. For me, it’s always an issue of trade-offs when it involves the selection of a correct low cut in mastering. A minimal phase (IIR or Infinite Impulse Response) EQ comes with a high risk of destroying the master within the time domain thanks to its phase behavior. this will create a sort of transient smearing because different frequency components of an equivalent transient event don’t appear at an equivalent time anymore (known as Group Delay). this might be a really tiny delay but enough to make an unnatural sense which is why I tend to avoid minimal phase EQs for low cutting. Also, a primary order 6 dB per octave low cut is not an alternative because it just does an inefficient job. On the opposite hand, a linear phase equalizer comes with the danger of smearing the transient with pre-ringing. However, with reasonable settings of the low cut, sort of a Q of 0.78 at 25 Hz, the ringing is so irrelevant and unnoticeable that I achieve a far tighter and apparently time correct result. this is often why we are saying that thEQorange has no smearing effect on transients if it’s applied with world, sensible settings in order that pre-ringing is kept to a minimum.
In many cases, once I control an excessive amount of low end during a mix, the kick suddenly goes from distracting low-end artifacts to appearing more punchy and sometimes seeming to possess more bass which isn’t logical but subjectively so since there’s less clutter. I can just explain it another way: It looks like more bass because the bass features a legitimate ‘pocket.’ It also translates better on the monitor system because it’s delivered as an accurate, time–aligned pulse alongside the high-frequency components.”
If One is sweet & Two is Better…
People have asked us why we haven’t included alternative modes like minimal phase and every one the opposite options you discover in competing products. Our goal as plug-in designers is to make tools from the user perspective, offering only enough flexibility with a carefully chosen set of options, therefore, the user can specialize in the work at hand. it might be easy to feature dozens of additional options to the preferences window but why? That’s what thEQblue is for, an entire box of “colors”! As a mastering engineer, you would like specialized tools that do a specific job within the fastest and absolute best manner.
thEQorange may be a perfect example of just such a tool. It offers everything you would like to declutter a tousled mix, and that we mastering engineers certainly receive such challenges more often as we might want. To arrive quickly at an optimal solution, we intentionally didn’t include parameter settings that are more hindrance than helpful. An example is that the lack of choice between the entire range of windowing options like triangular, Blackman or Hamming, because it simply won’t improve your deliverable. Including all those options, mostly coming from a universal DSP library, doesn’t mean they’re going to assist you to recover results. they’re needless, confusing complications, wasting some time with experimentation.
thEQorange was tuned by Dr.s Musialik and Hatje, who have already worked through an in depth refinement process. When asked about this, Musialik stated that “…the optimization and refinement of our algorithms was a really long, tedious and iterative procedure between research, development and feedback from experienced mastering engineers. Unfortunately, in high res audio, not everything is measurable or provable by numbers. this is often very true for the measurement of dynamic behavior and reactions to real–world, complex signals.”
Musialik emphasizes that “There is not any ‘best’ audio tool for everyone .” His advice: Perform your own listening tests, then select which additions you would like to incorporate in your kit.
Vive La Différence
What are the differences between thEQorange and thEQred? We recommend thEQo for “surgical” work, mostly negative gain EQs to deal with issues during a mix during mastering when material must be “fixed” because it’s a drag. On the opposite hand, thEQred is best at aesthetic work, artistic equalization that creates material sound better without affecting the time domain. like thEQorange and both being a linear phase, thEQred doesn’t leave a signature on the sound the way thEQblue does. Because it’s minimum phase, not a linear phase, thEQblue is for once you would reach for an analog EQ, but with ultimate fidelity that can’t be achieved with analog. So, the three of them together replace all EQ use cases, unless you would like distortion, and thEQblue with its 12 Architectures replaces all analog-style EQs one might want.
thEQred also has VariSlope, something we expect is exclusive within the industry. So, keep thereupon aesthetically minded approach, with thEQred, you’ll do really broad or really gentle lifts or suppression, also as all the “normal” stuff you’d expect from a fixed–order EQ.
If you’ll afford just one of our thEQ products, it’s probably best to travel with thEQblue. Its versatility is unsurpassed. If, however, you’re employed with a good amount of acoustically recorded performances and better fidelity recordings, then over time, you’ll find both thEQorange and thEQred indispensable. Specifically for that, we have got the annual Linear Phase subscription, which incorporates both thEQred and thEQorange.