Manufacturer's Description
Perfect Shape
The museq is an equalizer that combines premium sound shaping with optimally matched parameters and highest quality components, enabling the user to create musical results in no time at all. The five bands and their ample gain ranges as well as some special features make the museq a perfect choice for any tracking or mixing situation, and the stepped controllers are easily recallable for mix bus or mastering applications.
Build Quality
The museq is all about details.
Every single of its many aspects – sound, features, circuitry, components, design, materials, manufacturing – has been thought over and over until there was just nothing left to improve. Basically, every single part of our fine products is custom, and most of these are made according to our own designs and specs.
Only the best components the market has to offer are good enough for the alpha, and it shows. Each of our product is manually built to order and tested by ourselves, here at our headquarters in Germany.
Our product benefits sum up in an audio quality that is beyond all doubt. Even when extreme settings are used, the sound always stays clean and powerful. The museq achieves perfect processing results for all different styles of music and assures the ‘this is it’ feeling of a finished song. Its enhanced functions exceed the potential of normal equalizers by far and give you unimagined options for mastering and mixing.
Resonance Phenomena
The circuit design of the museq is 100% discrete analog technology. All signal processing is based on single transistors in permanent class-A mode, and even the power supply is composed of fully discrete circuits. In addition to the standard EQ features which cover the daily work, the museq has a couple of secret weapons for extended creative workouts up its sleeve.
The encapsulated and stepped conductive plastic potentiometers are custom built to our own specifications, and they are matched to pairs for every single unit. On top of this, the museq does not use any internal audio cabling at all. The result: Superior handling and perfect sound quality.
Active Bandpasses with FETs
All filter stages of the museq are active designs without any inductors. The actual layout of the bandpasses is where the magic happens: Basically, they are composed of only six transistors, two capacitors and the resistor that determines the frequency.
This circuitry forms a bandpass that operates without any feedback, which results in a very musical sound. Especially regarding filters this puristic and compact design is of considerable acoustic benefit.
Resonance High and Low Pass Filter
The outer bands of the museq show a great amount of flexibility. In their standard mode, they are set up as sweet sounding high and low shelf filters that can be used to tailor the airiness and fundamentals of your tracks fast and efficiently.
As a special feature, you can independently switch these to become high and low cut filters with 12 dB per octave and an additional resonance peak at the knee frequency. This allows some very interesting and useful filter curves.
Especially bass frequencies can benefit from a low cut with resonance by obtaining a clean and punchy character. But the resonance can also be used to stretch signals in the bass range, because the resonance filter causes a longer post-oscillation time.
In the high frequency range, you can use the resonance filter to put an accent on a selected frequency without boosting the complete HF spectrum at the same time, which can prevent harshness or an unwanted shift of the overall perception towards the treble.
Parallel Filter Design
Another specialty is the design of the high and low pass filters: in actual fact, the high pass with resonance is a low pass with resonance which is flipped in its phase and then mixed with the original signal.
This has the great advantage that the mid and high frequencies are not affected by the filter and therefore do not change in sound at all. Only the bass frequency region is processed by the filter and the entire signal remains open and transparent.
Warm Mode
This function is basically a slew rate limiter that reduces the speed of the output amplifier stages. This affects the frequency spectrum, the harmonics and the transient response at the same time.
Fast transients are slowed down a bit and the overall sound appears more round and merged. As this function influences the behavior of the output stages, the effect it creates has an impact on the complete processing results of all EQ stages.
In this way the museq offers two different sound characters at the push of a button: The powerful transparency of the discrete class-A circuitry and the saturated richness of the Warm mode.
Pure Transparency
All active stages in the museq are based on current feedback amplifiers which have been optimized for a top notch impulse response. These amplifier stages operate completely without the use of additional capacitors.
These caps are usually inserted to eliminate high frequency oscillation (at the cost of affecting the frequency response). The result of consequently not using this kind of capacitors at all is an amplifier which sounds natural, open, dynamic and transparent.
Boost/Cut Mode
Each band of the museq can be switched from boost into cut mode. The advantage is that the complete controller range is utilized for the desired action and the resolution of the stepped potentiometers is twice as large.
Another noteworthy fact is that the filters carry a signal permanently, which grants a superb signal to noise ratio and also produces a pleasant amount of harmonics.
Not until the gain controller is used, the specific frequency band will come into action. If the gain controller remains in its 0 position, the signal will not be affected at all – the band is virtually switched off.
Switchable Filter Quality
The filter quality of the three parametric bands can be switched between two characteristics: wide (Q 0.5) and narrow (Q 1.3). This does not have any effect on the maximum amplitude. The filters are based on the constant Q principle, which provides an ever constant filter quality that is independent from the gain controller.
Stepped and Matched Potentiometers
The museq features stepped conductive plastic potentiometers for all its parameters throughout. The 21 steps make a precise recall very easy, which is very convenient not only for mastering purposes.
In order to keep the component tolerance as low as possible, we measure all potentiometers and match them as stereo pairs with a software routine we have written exactly for this purpose. The obvious benefit of this effort is that the left and the right channel behave exactly the same.
100% Discrete Class-A
To explain the advantages of discrete circuitry we’d like to present a comparison that might seem a little odd at first: Audio technology vs. cooking! If somebody uses instant meals exclusively, he will have to accept whatever comes out of the box. A creative cook, however, focuses on his own special recipes and ingredients.
In this respect, integrated circuits (ICs) are pretty similar to packet soups: they are cheap, mainstream and they simply do not match haute cuisine. So if you want to design an analog audio device 100% according to your own demands and ideas without any compromise, there will be no way around a discrete design.
The museq follows this philosophy consequently. Not only all filter and gain stages, but also the complete power supply have specially been designed for this unit and they are built by the use of discrete components exclusively. A truly unique recipe!
In addition, our musical equalizer operates in permanent class-A mode. This means that the transistors are always conductive, resulting in the absence of crossover distortion and providing a pristine sonic base: The general sound character is always wide, open and punchy.
Specifications
Frequency response
Low Band
- Shelf Filter: 9 – 200 Hz (+/-15 dB)
- Cut Filter: 9 – 200 Hz
Bottom Band
- Peak Filter: 18 – 400 Hz (+/-15 dB)
- Quality factor (Q): 1.3 (wide) and 0.5 (narrow)
Middle Band
- Peak Filter: 150 Hz – 3.5 kHz (+/-15 dB)
- Quality factor (Q): 1.3 (wide) and 0.5 (narrow)
Top Band
- Peak Filter: 700 Hz – 16 kHz (+/-15 dB)
- Quality factor (Q): 1.3 (wide) and 0.5 (narrow)
High Band
- Shelf Filter: 1.8 – 35 kHz (+/-15 dB)
- Cut Filter: 1.8 – 35 kHz
THD+N
- @ 0 dBu, 20 Hz – 22 kHz: 0.0037 %
- @ +10 dBu, 20 Hz – 22 kHz: 0.0038 %
Noise floor
- 20 Hz – 20 kHz (A-weighted): -91.6 dBu
Dynamic range
Maximum level
- Input: +27 dBu
- Output: +27 dBu
Impedance
- Input: 10 kOhm
- Output: 68 Ohm
