The legendary passive EQ, Pultec EQP-1, is one of the most sought-after pieces of vintage hardware. Original units can easily fetch well into five figures – on the rare occasions that they come up for sale – and even many newer hardware versions can cost up to £5000. Fortunately, as we shall see, there are plenty of both hardware and software alternatives.
The EQP-1’s beauty lies in a combination of simple operation, its broad sweeps of frequency cutting and boosting, an ability to impart an almost indefinable presence on whatever signal you put through it, and the extraordinary character you get when you broadly disobey what you’re told by the manual!
