I love EQs. That may sound strange to some of you, but a good EQ let’s you carve out space in the frequencies of your music, so everything has a nice comfortable place to live. A couple of weeks ago, Universal Audio released the Trident A-Range Classic Console EQ. Being an EQ lover, I decided to give it a try and see how it stacked up to some of my favorite EQs like the Neve 1073, 1081 and Pultec.

This particular A-Range was modeled using the Trident A-Range console in the New Monkey Studio in Van Nuys, CA. One of only 13 desks ever built, this console was used to make albums by the Police and Rush.

As luck would have it, I was asked to write a theme song for the Angry Mac Bastards Podcast the day before this plug-in came out. The timing couldn’t have been better for trying out a new audio plug-in. I decided to exclusively use the A-Range when mixing the song.

The A-Range is a four-band EQ that goes from 50HZ to 150HZ on the first band; 250HZ to 2K on the second; 3K to 9K on the third and 8K to 15K on the fourth. All bands go from a +15 to -15.

Obviously with notched bands you are going to find the specific frequency you are looking for and boost or cut as needed. The response of the EQ was pretty much what I expected, but since all EQs are not the same, I took the time to play around until I felt comfortable with the settings.

The real magic of the A-Range isn’t in the four bands, it’s in the filtering. The EQ has three low pass and three high pass filters that can be combined in any number of ways, giving you a unique sound for every single piece of your music.

Arranging the buttons in different configurations is something you just have to try to get it. Once I started pushing buttons and getting the hang of what it was doing, combining cut filters was a big part of what I did on that song.

Incorporating the combinations of cut filters with the four bands definitely makes the A-Range a unique sounding EQ that is unmatched in anything else I’ve tried.

The Trident A-Range EQ costs $249 and is available for purchase and download from Universal Audio’s Web site.