Dangerous music are a modern brand, their first products were a summing box and a monitor controller. Both products designed to fill the hole left by a mixing desk in the post-console world of in the box studios. Extremely popular with the high end market, when looking for companies manufacturing modern future-classic gear, Dangerous are definitely one.
But however modern the company, the technology behind the Dangerous BAX EQ is distinctly vintage. The Baxandall filter design which gives this EQ its name was first published in 1952. It was a hugely successful high and low shelf design which outperformed the prevailing passive networks which were common at the time through use of negative feedback. It went on to become very popular in HiFi equipment though Peter Baxandall, the designer, never received any royalties for the design.
The Baxandall shelf shapes are distinctive because the high shelf rises smoothly and very gradually, never quite flattening off into a shelf. This rise can be over as much as five octaves so this is a very broad brush EQ, progressively cutting or boosting more as frequency increases. The low shelf curve looks like a conventional shelf though it is still noticeably smooth. These two shelving filters, when combined with the 12dB/Oct high and low pass filters allow for some surprisingly detailed EQ work when used in combination.
In these digital days it might be difficult for people who take such things for granted to appreciate that there was a time when you couldn’t have any EQ curve you liked, you were limited by existing designs, usually named after their inventor, with names like Butterworth, Chebyshev and Bessel. The Baxandall design as implemented by Dangerous is a no-compromise hardware EQ which would as likely as not find itself in a mastering application or across a buss. It is well suited to this application, especially as is offers both L+R stereo and mid-side modes of operation. Of course one of the most obvious advantages of a plug-in version of an expensive piece of hardware is the possibility of using multiple instances across a mix and with an EQ which offers the elusive "sweetness" at the top end that this EQ does then the opportunities for subtle and not-so-subtle treatment of the top and bottom ends of your mix are endless.
This plug-in made an impression on Russ when he reviewed it last year, so much so that he gave it an Editor's Choice award. Watch his review to hear the Dangerous Music Baxandall EQ in action.