Equilibrium is easily the most forward thinking and most important addition to my toolbox to date. Unparalleled flexibility, versatility and sonics make this a must have for everyone serious about the art of making records.

This is an incredible equalizer. There is no loss of transparency in the Equilibrium LP compared with MP, none whatsoever that I can hear. Equilibrium has changed all my assumptions about the sound of LP equalizers.

This could well be the greatest EQ ever made - it's certainly the most versatile and it's definitely revolutionary. Utterly essential. 10/10.

Besides adjusting gain, EQ is the most commonly used process in any audio workflow. Yet it's been years since there was a radical change in how EQs are designed. I've been a student of EQ design my entire career - I was even designing EQs before I started at Focusrite!

I wanted to make a bold statement about what the future should look like - about reclaiming all that was good about the past, and simply adding more.

The EQuilibrium design process started with thinking about what the different facets of an EQ are. We decided that the different facets are these: Curves, Audio fidelity, Interface, Routing. So we looked at each facet individually, and took them deeper.

The Curves are fascinating - I've spent years poring over schematics, collecting transfer functions to find out what it is that makes certain EQs so special. Gain-Q interactivity is one, Gain-frequency interactivity another. Or just interesting settings that bring some vibe. Understanding what curves and interactions have stayed with us over the decades tells us a lot about what we use EQs to achieve. Parallel and series configurations are fascinating too.

Audio fidelity is a real passion of mine - so I revamped the EQuality audio engine to allow a further layer of control; the IIR mode replaces Digital mode in EQuality - that was a bad choice of name, since the entire point of it is that it sounds indistinguishable from the analogue, whilst using the minimum possible amount of CPU usage. Digital+ now has a resizable +, in that you can configure the degree of compensation, and freely tune it. The Phase modes have been revamped entirely - now you can assign phase for each band independently, tune the windowing, and there are graphs for everything, so if you're a mastering engineer wanting to control ringing, you can see the ringing clearly, and what's affecting it!

Interface we've gone perhaps a little overboard with. There's really no grand consensus on how you want to interact with an EQ, so we made it fully configurable. Graphs, knobs, keyboards, textboxes, tooltips, the whole gamut is in there, and can be arranged to suit you. The degree of UI reconfiguration is so extreme we've built a setup wizard, which must be a first for an EQ.

Routing is interesting too. There are scant few fully surround-capable EQs, and it seemed silly not to support routing flexibility to its fullest. For stereo usage there's the simple familiar M/S or L/R configuration, but for surround there's full channel grouping support. We've added per-channel metering, with gains, phase, solo/mute and linkage, so you have half a mixer in there too.

For a few years, I've felt like it was time for a revolution in EQ - no more being held back by the bizarre requirement for rack-ears and photorealistic knobs. It's not photos of gear that bring vibe - it's the soul, the curves! So that's what we've built. A surfeit of functionality predicated on the curves of the greatest EQs from times past.

- Dave Gamble, 2013