Empirical Labs are one of my favourite audio companies. They have been making killer hardware for years now, with the well known and loved Distressor and the lesser known and under appreciated FATSO being my particular favourites. But they were always a hardware company who fought hard about remaining so, until recently…
It is clear by now that Empirical Lab’s have joined the ranks of plugin makers well and truly. The success of the Arouser Plugin has shown they are just as capable of making great plugins as well as great hardware. For me personally, now that I have left the Universal Audio plugin world, would have loved to see an Empirical Labs FATSO plugin next, but that is not the case.
What Empirical Labs have delivered is an EQ plugin based on the Empirical Labs Lil FrEQ hardware equaliser. Just as they did with the Arouser plugin which was a software version of the Distressor hardware, they have made the Big FrEQ plugin do a lot more than the hardware.
“With twelve powerful sections of processing, BIG FrEQ offers the ability to create modern “flat-top” parametric shapes with an analog workflow and added controls for more tone-shaping possibilities than a typical EQ plug-in.”
Thankfully the interface of the Empirical Labs Big FrEQ is more user friendly than the hardware it emulates and is in fact quite logical in layout. I am sure we will get our hands on it at some point, but for now you can grab a copy for an introductory price of US$129. Normal price is US$149.
