Our selection here aims to highlight options for every EQ situation: For example, are you looking for a processor for sweetening and bringing out or adding character to instruments are you looking to gently tame parts or mixes with broad and smooth cuts and boosts, or are you after the audio equivalent of a surgeons scalpel for highly focused, precision adjustments? These clean, ‘digital’-style EQs offer the sort of flexibility, accuracy and, usually, a transparency that engineers in the 1950s could only dream of, working as they were with imperfect analogue components. However, when it comes to pure sonic character and musicality, analogue and analogue-modelling EQ is still hard to beat. Nowadays, we all have pretty amazing EQ functionality by default built into our DAWs.

As soon as it became possible to record and transmit audio electrically, and then electronically, engineers and music-makers also began developing various ways of sculpting the sound by boosting or cutting specific parts of the frequency spectrum independently from the rest of the signal. The equaliser is one of the longest-serving and most fundamental sound processing tools. To celebrate the release of the Get That Pro Sound Ultimate Guide to Equalisation, we’ve put together this run-down of the very best EQ plugins available in the world.