Dangerous Music - Bax EQ
- Signal Chain
- Dangerous Music BAX EQ
Silky smooth single rack EQ unit modeled after one of the most popular vintage tone boxes, the BAX EQ features unique and incredibly useful tools with unprecedented sound quality.
Special ends:
$2,699.00
Price: $2,999.00
If you’ve ever adjusted the bass and treble on a hi-end stereo system, a boom box or even a car stereo, then you’ve used a Baxandall EQ. Originally designed by the now legendary electronics designer Peter Baxandall, these are the world’s most popular EQ curves for a good reason: they are able to improve the sound of anything you throw at them. The Dangerous BAX EQ is the first professional, stand-alone EQ to use the famous Baxandall curves, and our version – designed by our own legendary designer Chris Muth – has become an instant classic among mixing, mastering and tracking engineers. It’s so loved, in fact, that most are leaving it patched into their audio path full time where it sweetens and deepens all kinds of music…day in, day out, all year long.
At the heart of this stereo unit are gently sweeping treble and bass EQ shelves (the Baxandall Curves) that give you subtle yet profound control over wide sections of the frequency spectrum. The opposite of a surgical tool, the BAX EQ is all about sweetening sounds with broad, musical adjustments. Starting far below and above the human hearing limit, the broad and gentle EQ curves gently tug at the audible frequencies in ways that other EQs cannot. This unique design provides a distinctively sweet and open treble along with a powerful and three-dimensional low-end you simply can’t get out of other EQs.
The bass and treble shelves found on most professional EQs introduce phase delay and other audible artifacts, sometimes called “color.” The BAX EQ’s shelves maintain phase coherence, and — because it is built from the same ultra-high-grade components we use in all our equipment — the BAX EQ does not change the characteristics of the original sound. This is the ineffable paradox of real analog transparency: you have the ability to make powerful changes without substantially altering the original sonic characteristics. Rather than adding more color, you’ll hear the original colors more beautifully, more openly and more powerfully, no matter how far you push it.
Beyond the easy-to-use shelf controls, the BAX EQ is equipped with sophisticated filtering options that vastly expand its versatility. The cut filters on either end of the spectrum dial out unneeded frequencies that will be boosted at the far end of the shelves. On the low end, you can cut below 12 Hz, where headroom-eating, infrasonic rumble and DC-offset live. On the high end, you can dial out ultra-sonics like 70 kHz that can carry out-of-band noise that translates as harshness in many A/D converters. And when you start playing the cut filters against the shelves, a whole world of unique tone-shaping opens up within the audible frequency band – sounds you wont get anywhere else.
In a category all its own, the BAX EQ will compliment any studio configuration. Outstanding in a mastering rig, on a whole mix or in any tracking chain, the BAX EQ lets you effortlessly sweeten and deepen any music — like the best bass-treble controls you’ve ever used.
As with all of our products, the Bax EQ incorporates a sophisticated circuit design, uncompromising quality, and is elegantly straightforward to use.
♦ Unique Design Based on the bass-treble tone control EQ.
♦ Ultra-high quality components.
♦ Stepped controls throughout for accuracy and repeatability.
♦ Broad Q-shelving for a natural, open transparent sound.
♦ 7-position phase coherent high-pass and low-pass filters on relays.
♦ 8-position high- and low-frequency selection.
♦ 5dB cut and boost controls in 1/2dB step for precise control.
The company’s mission is to solve the problems of the ‘hybrid studio’ by leveraging the best of both worlds: seamless integration of analog and digital equipment’s strengths and eliminating their weaknesses. Since product designer Chris Muth’s time has been spent almost exclusively designing custom equipment for many of the world’s preeminent mastering engineers and facilities, the combination of a mastering quality audio path with an intuitive feature set became the company’s baseline. It is worth noting that these designs evolved not in a vacuum but with input from some of the best ears in the business, refined in a working mastering environment instead of on paper. In the end, listening makes all the difference.
Born out of the shop at Dangerous Music recording studios, the equipment company was officially founded in 2001 with the commercial release of the Dangerous 2-Bus analog summing amplifier. Dangerous Music product designs were created to answer the sonic and ergonomic challenges presented by the changing studio environment as it moved from analog consoles and analog multi-track tape recorders to hard-disk recording and software-based digital mixer/editors, collectively known as digital audio workstations, or DAWs.
The process of recording and mixing without an analog console or tape deck created the opportunity to develop products that allowed engineers to embrace all the power and convenience of a DAWs automation, editing and recall, while continuing to work as they had, with console-style tone and headroom, hardware monitor control, metering, speaker and input source switching, and the ability to insert analog processors into the signal path easily and with the highest quality results.
Company co-founder Bob Muller says, “The ideas behind Dangerous Music products are driven by the needs of the music community, who continuously finds new ways to work in the studio. Early on we concluded that once the smoke cleared it was not going to be an all-analog or all-digital studio, but a hybrid environment. We all embrace the benefits of new technologies, but the inevitable problems that arise need to be solved. As the analog console yielded to the DAW mixer as the focal point of the control room we recognized that certain equipment was now missing that is required to actually make a studio fully functional, sonically pleasing and ergonomically sensible. When you aren’t spending all your time clicking around computer menus, you can actually concentrate on the performance, the music, and the other creative elements of what recording and mixing is supposed to be.”
Frequency Response:
+- 0.1dB from 10Hz to 20kHz
+- 0.2dB from 1Hz to 80kHz
Maximum level: >+28dBu
Noise floor: <-92dBu band limited from 22Hz-22kHz
THD+N: <0.002%
IMD: <0.003%
Crosstalk rejection: >105dB
Replacement Fuses:
USA 500mA fast blow for 120V
Europe 250mA fast blow for 240V
Input Impedance: 25K Ohms
Output Impedance: 50 Ohms
Warranty:
1 year parts and labor, subject to inspection. Does not include damage incurred through abusive operation or modifications/attempted repair by unauthorized technicians. 2 years with online registration.