museq
The musical Equalizer

museq

The Analog Musical Equalizer

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.

5 reasons why you should use the museq

even there are many more!

Build Quality
The museq, just like all our products, is designed, engineered and handcrafted in Germany.
100% Discrete Class-A Technology
Consequently represents the art of discrete signal processing
Warm Mode Function
This is second, switchable sound flavor by altering its frequency spectrum, harmonics and transient response.
Pure Transparency Filter Stages
Puristic design of the filter stages with current feedback amplifier stages and without any coupling capacitors results in an outstanding sound quality.On-board frequency selective compression.
Active Bandpasses
The filter stages are completely active and benefit from a puristic design approach without any coupling capacitors – the basis for a truly musical EQ.

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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 Resonance High & Low Pass Filter Parallel Filter Design Warm Mode Pure Transparency

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.

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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.

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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 Switchable Filter Quality Stepped & Matched Potentiometers 100% Discrete Class-A Technical Data

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.

Technical Data

Frequency response
200 kHz (-0.2 dB)

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
20 Hz – 22 kHz: 119 dB

Maximum level
Input: +27 dBu
Output: +27 dBu

Impedance
Input: 10 kOhm
Output: 68 Ohm

John Greenham in front of his Studio Rack with elysia museq and alpha compressor

Multiple Grammy Awards

“I use the museq on basically every mastering project that comes through my studio. I find especially the top end sheen that comes from the high shelf is very useful. It’s very clear and open sounding and one can use quite a lot of boost without any harshness. In fact from top to bottom of the frequency range the eq sounds very good, but more importantly it’s very musical. Since I’ve had it I can’t remember a single project where I decided the sound was better without it! It is very clean sounding, yet at the same time it does have a very nice but subtle vibe to it.

I work on music of many different genres and in my experience it’s quite rare to find analog processors of any kind that are built well enough so that one can pass the entire stereo mix of any type of music through them and they don’t do anything that you don’t want. For me, the museq is one of those rare devices.”

John Greenham | Mastering Engineer (Billie Eilish, Katy Perry, Ice Cube) | Los Angeles

Super Fun

“As big fans of analog processing and modern sound design/tonal possibilities, the museq was a natural choice for us. While many companies chase the recreation of vintage classics, what was interesting and exciting for us was that elysia is creating modern classics.

Sculpting sound through the museq is super fun – no matter how much we boost or cut, it always sounds great. The tone of the museq is an essential part of our analog processing chain and we use it for tracking, mixing, and mastering.”

Siddhu Sudarshan | The Kamasutra Lovers | Paris

Heavy User

“This is a very crisp EQ that allows tons of boost without sounding EQed – I often find myself boosting 10-15 dB without taking particular note of that ;-) The museq *can* be super clean, but the switchable slew rate limiting circuit gives it a nice subtle ‘vintage’ type coloring.

The bottom end is very solid, the treble very smooth yet fast – transient response on the unit is nearly scary. This EQ can be subtle, and it can as well be used for extreme curve bending while always retaining signal integrity… elysia style.”

Denis Goekdag | Zynaptiq | Hannover