A while back I was on the look out for a small footprint EQ pedal for my Schecter Ultra VI guitar and ended up purchasing the 6 band MXR EQ, but after checking out Source Audio’s Programmable EQ, I’m thinking I purchased the wrong unit. The Source Audio Programmable EQ is housed in a single unit aluminum enclosure and allows you to store presets. You can store 4 presents, and the EQ is a 8 band EQ ranging from 62Hz to 8kHz. It is equipped with MIDI in and has a cool LED/knob for output. The more gain (up to 18dB) the brighter the knob lights up.
There is a very cool auto-scroll mode that will scroll through the presets giving a tremolo or sequencer like effect. Basically scrolls through each preset, you can adjust this sweep. You can pick up the Source Audio Programmable EQ for only $149.00 at Amazon.
Now, here is a great video showing Will Cady of Source Audio showing the various EQ settings that can be achieved with the Source Audio Programmable EQ. The auto-scroll feature is pretty cool and interesting. He also demonstrates how the EQ can be used to overdrive the amp.
As you can see and hear, it’s a pretty cool EQ unit. For more information about Source Audio, please check out their website!
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11 years ago
Interesting, no doubt… When I saw the first magazine ads, I called Source Audio: the techie answers guy wasn’t in… and I found myself talking to the CEO (a man with plenty of engineering and design savvy himself) who was VERY generous in addressing ALL my questions, including my long-time-involved, ‘high end’ hi-fi (designer-guy) ones about the digital chipset inside and the design choices made. But please don’t bother HIM, pedal GASsers — you didn’t hear the CEO thing from me! I just wanted to vouch for the “nice folks here” aspect of the company.
And I learned — by means of my own knowledge base — that they are not corner-cutters at Source Audio (within reasonable bounds of designing a real world product to a market-complementary selling price).
My principle concern with this pedal and, in fact, all digital audio based pedals is doubting the wisdom of going into and out of the digital realm more than ONCE in any signal chain — In the hi-fi world (or the project studio one, for that matter) I would personally avoid this at almost any reasonable “cost”. As a longtime player (not including the quarter-century hiatus, that is!)– but one still relatively new to electric guitar — I am still not too sure how meaningful this concern is in a pedal chain. The issue is the Humpty Dumpty problem: A-to-D and D-to-A converters & digital filter algorithms are NOT really designed for inputs “pre-distorted” in a number of frankly “unnatural” ways by earlier A-D/D-A conversions. There are numerous very ARBITRARY decisions made in chipset design, folks: Digital gives you an INTERPRETATION, and NOT an “analog” — get it?
The problem is much more severe in the case of stacking lossy data compression schemes like MP-3 and ACC… but still.
Of course, I am talking about fairly clean playing on premium quality “clean” amps, using high end cables… and technical standards rather far removed from those contemporary 20-year-olds are typically concerned with. I am not saying you don’t want “digital” pedals — I’m suggesting not stacking them thoughtlessly.
I eagerly invite comments on this (hypothetical) point from readers’ own playing experience. Am I making a tempest in a teapot, or not? Thrashers, grungers, “neo-punks”, etc., need not respond (but more power to you in what you do)! Thanks for listening.
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