Eiosis Air EQ               Back to fader8's audio blog Index

I really like this EQ. 

There's two unique things about it. First, you can turn off all the value displays for all parameters. Rare for a parametric. This means you're stuck using your ears only to tweak it in. 

You can also set it to display MIDI note name instead of frequency, and for those of us who spend a lot of time with synths and samplers, that's pretty cool.

The second unique and cool attribute of this EQ is the mysterious "Air" knob. Its description from the (obviously translated) manual:

"The Air band is a special filter which is useful for adding brightness and Air to the 

sound. This special filter adds high frequencies without being harsh or unpleasant. It 

only has one gain parameter, which allows adjusting the Air amount. This filter is not 

symmetric, i.e. it has not the same shape for positive and negative gains. 

For standard high frequency enhancement, use gain between up to 3dBs. For sounds 

which particularly lack high frequencies, use gain up to 6dB. Upper values are useful 

when you have a very dull sound, when you want to refresh the highs or when the 

record where damaged. 

At high gain values, be careful of output clipping : high frequency boosts may increase 

digital clipping, so you can add a high cut filter to limit these high frequency clippings." 

OK, perhaps I'm going against the grain of the "use your ears" philosophy here, but I've plotted a few curves with this control to see just what it's doing.

Here's a +6dB peak setting at about 2K:

(Yes, I know the gain says +4.1dB. Never believe what plug-ins tell you. Use your ears, LOL.)

Here's the same peak, but this time with "just a little" Air added. 

Obviously, you'll want to take it easy with this parameter!

But you can really achieve some interesting curves for track use with this EQ, while 

still maintaining really decent phase performance. Here's a cut example:

And a nice "analog sounding" shelf:

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