Dan Worrall Pro-Q3 vs Kirchoff

Hard to move away from ff: why ?

For these kind of EQs, I just can't see a reason.  I do like some of the saturated hardware style ones like Slick EQ and console modeled ones.  But for getting clean work done... can't beat it.

Dan Worral is being an apologist for worse sound and distortion for a plug from a company who pays him again. See his earlier comparison of Pro Q3 vs Bettermaker where Bettermaker sounded much better yet according to him it's the same. Just not true if you compared pro q 3 to the plugin alliance bettermaker plugin for an easy to demo one. They do not sound the same.

Worral is totally ignoring filter structure, phase, and impulse response. His nulltests will reveal nothing because Fabfilter Q3 uses 64-bit float precision internally yet rounds to 32-bit float for in and out. 32-bit float is still a wide enough container to contain a 24-bit signal and the thermal noise of analog equipment at 1 kHz yet a null test with a sine wave or pink noise will not reveal extremely low lever artifacts from filter structure differences, only the rounding error / noise that doesn't matter in the real world at all. Noise you might hear it with stupid random filters but it will be harder than with music with useful filters.

Then he repeats some bullshit about great gear was really great music. Yeah tell that to all the bands from the 70s to 2000s with cool music whose recordings sound like absolute crap or have no low end or the vocals are cooked. They all would've sounded better with better gear and their recordings would be more accepted by the general populace. 90s Godflesh with the 8 channel Tascam sounds like absolute crap compared to Streetcleaner and the later stuff. Tell that to an artist with interface pres that sound like plastic or dirty as hell and of course their recordings would sound much more lifelike with a clean pre or maybe better than reality with complimentary colored pre.

Worral probably uses some old Mackie at home and thinks everything more or less distorted than his preferred brand of live sound equipment chock full of textbook circuits built with the cheapest opamps you can buy by the 10s of thousands in the PRC and probably fake caps is bullshit.

I default to Natural mode, but when doing something like EQ'ing sources with bleed or something, I find linear keeps the low end intact far better.  Like creating a crossover on a DI track and amped bass track.

Shady shade going on, no doubt.

There's a part 2 now:

a real world example. i'm using the massenburg plugin eq a lot because i like that the gui is left to right and most of the q settings are sharp yet i can't even make it sound as clear sometimes at 44.1 khz sessions as at 88.2 because it oversamples x2 at 44.1 and 48 to get rid of most of the cramping. i've heard the filter darken snares at 44.1 yet not at 88.2 and to check to see if it was my converters anti-alias filters, i rendered out each online render, converted the 88.2 one to 44.1 (adds another, far steeper antialias filter), and the 44.1 khz massenburg eq one was still darker. i used the ancient oxford eq on that mix. yet on others the tdr slick eq that 4x oversamples was the best sounding eq. and i've done the notch in many eqs and tried to match it in plugin doctor quickly to get the sound just a bit better, sometimes nulled it pretty far down, yet one just sounds better so i go with it.

to say that one eq plugin where on most of the settings on it you will get cuts that will in no way resemble the other and whose workflow encourages you to be more methodical in the hope that it will pay off in the end vs one that encourages you to be very fast and make eq moves that look good and claim that they are same in the real world and sound the same is a pretty drastic claim. boost and cut until something sounds good on typical 3-5 band hardware or hardware style eqs and the curves will look like nothing you would ever make in some pro q clone. even for the massenburg eq i like, you get 5 bands per instance. 3 on the cut down to save dsp pro tools version. so you might only get a high pass, two shelves, 1 sharp bell, and one boost or cut. you might put the 3 band on a pro tools session and you're like "a high pass, a box cut, and a high shelf" on a snare and that might be all you do and move on because it sounds okay and that's all you can do without another insert but it sounds good enough vs someone with pro q trying to push up where the fundamental and wires are. maybe that might sound better but you don't have the bands for that on a 3 band eq. or maybe you are still unhappy and compare similar filters in both to see which one sounds better and then go with that one. you can easily lock yourself into some kind of path dependency even with basic tools and familiar habits.