Ingram Engineering EQ52

Its combination of ‘See‑Saw’ band and filters make this classy EQ really versatile.

Eric Ingram runs Ingram Engineering from his home in Atlanta, and it draws on not only his passion for audio electronics but also his background as a musician. The company’s small but steadily growing range of studio hardware began with the release of a two‑channel preamp in the early 2000s, but in more recent years the main focus has been on 500‑series modules. Ingram offer a few different modules, covering preamplification, EQ and dynamics processing. Under review here is their latest release, which puts an intriguing set of EQ tools into the compact 500‑series format.

Features

The EQ52 has three different sections, which are far more straightforward to use than first appearances might suggest. Working down from the top, an EQ In control toggles the entire EQ circuitry in/out of bypass. Next, a passive high‑pass filter provides a gentle 6dB/octave cut over a wide, adjustable frequency range. A push‑switch selects one of two frequency ranges: 45‑600 Hz, which you might typically use to filter out low frequencies when recording or mixing; or 640Hz to 5kHz, for more extreme tone shaping, or perhaps use as an analogue side‑chain filter EQ — for example, to focus a compressor’s sensitivity more towards the mids/high end.

Next, we have what Ingram call the See‑Saw filter, and others describe variously as a tilt or pivot filter. The see‑saw, with its straight‑line lever balancing and pivoting around a fulcrum, is a good visual analogy! You select the pivot frequency and then, as you bring one side of the frequency spectrum up or down, the opposite happens to the frequencies on the other side of this fulcrum. The result can be a drastic tonal rebalancing or subtle enhancement, but it always seems to be a very ‘natural’, smooth‑sounding tonal shaping. As with all sections of the EQ52,...