Recording - October 2012 - 52

B Y PA U L V N U K J R .

Dangerous Music Bax EQ
A sweet set of tone-tuning tools at your fingertips

Dangerous Music is best known as a manufacturer of high-end monitoring and summing solutions such as the Dangerous Monitor ST/SR, Dangerous D-Box and Dangerous 2-Bus among others. This month we evaluate its first equalizer, the Dangerous Bax EQ, which (as its name suggests) makes use of Peter Baxandall’s famous 1950s equalization curves. Bax fax The Baxandall eq curve is similar to a standard shelving eq, but it’s more gentle and sloping with a very wide Q. As such it is better suited for broad-stroke sonic sweetening versus the tighter and precise modern shelves most of us use for cutting and boosting. Traditionally, Bax curves have found the most use in the bass and treble controls on home hi-fi equipment and car stereos. Often they were combined into a single tone control where increasing the low shelf proportionately decreases the high shelf and vice versa. Amplifier companies like Ampeg also made use of the Bax style eq on many of their guitar and bass amps, but interestingly this style of eq never quite made the leap to pro-audio and recording. Only recently has it started to infiltrate the plug-in domain in Elysia’s niveau filter, Softube’s Tonelux Tilt emulation, Nomad Factory’s BX2S, Brainworx Digital_V2 EQ and a few others. After much internet sleuthing I found only three current hardware models that incorporate the Bax-style eq: the Tonelux Tilt, the XQP Audio 535, and the Dangerous Bax. Imagine being a fly on the wall on the day when Dangerous designers Bob Muller and Chris Muth decided to create a standalone, high-end, mastering grade, no-compromise Bax EQ. Was this idea crazy, genius, or both? Let’s find out.
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Bax build The Bax EQ is a single space 19" rack unit featuring thick all-metal construction. It is dressed smartly with large contoured metal knobs, all in black except for the orange Dangerous logo and colored parameter names. As with all things Dangerous, every structural, sonic, and design detail has been tended to and is of the utmost quality. The Bax is a stereo unit with Neutrik XLR inputs and outputs. The front panel has eight high-grade, stepped rotary switches, and a square backlit true-bypass switch. In addition to its high and low Baxandall EQ circuits the unit also contains high- and lowpass filtering. While minimal and of the non-surgical eq variety, this combination of filters and broad Baxandall curves manages to yield a high level of tone sculpting. Rid the rumble From left to right it starts with the lowcut section. Unlike many low-cut (highpass) filters this is neither preset at (say) 80 Hz nor is it fully variable. Instead, it offers a bit of both worlds. The low filter features a 12 dB-peroctave roll-off with 7 selectable frequencies: 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 43 & 54 Hz. As you can see it does not reach very high at all compared to many other current units that stretch up 150 Hz, and that is because this unit’s job is not only to sculpt the low end, but also to filter out what the Dangerous folks call infrasonic rumble. This is the extremely low, mostly imperceptible noise caused by things like air conditioners, planes, trains, automobiles and (in the unfortunate case of my studio) tractors. It’s a low end you feel; it does nothing other than eat up bandwidth and can wreak havoc with compressors.

A unique feature of this filter is an individual relay circuit. This circuit only places the selected frequency filter in the audio path and bypasses the entire circuit completely when it is out. This is one of those audiophile design details Dangerous is known for that helps keep the audio path as minimal as possible and free from phase shift, distortion and noise. The shelves Next up is the Baxandall low shelf with fixed frequency choices of 74, 84, 98, 116, 131, 166, 230 & 361 Hz that can be boosted or cut by up to 5 dB in 1/2 dB steps. Here is where understanding the Baxandall curve is important. As I mentioned above, most typical shelves slope up or down to a frequency in a sharp linear fashion and then proceed to raise or lower all adjacent frequencies by an equal amount. For example, if you choose 100 Hz, all frequencies at 100 Hz and below would be affected equally. With a Baxandall curve, the chosen frequency in the low shelf actually sits at the bottom shoulder of the eq slope and extends gently over into the midrange frequencies, so the frequency range is lifted or lessened in a much wider, somewhat pillowy, pleasing by-ear sort of way. The high shelf is similar, however the set frequency is actually in the middle of the slope, rather than the “shoulder” as is the case for the low shelf’s numbers—this makes them a bit more intuitive. Here the choices are: 18, 7.1, 4.8, 3.5, 2.4, 2.1, 1.8 and 1.6 kHz, again with 5 dB of cut or boost. Out-of-band = out of ears Last we have the high-cut circuit that is functionally just like the low-cut, but is designed to not only shape the highs but

Recording - October 2012

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