Death to 100

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Since so many people are fond of this method of low cut I decided it would be a vital part of the GEQ Shootout. Personally, I prefer variable high pass but to each his own.

There was no clear winner in this category. Choosing a winner depends on your application and whether or not your EQ gear ever gets treated with this kind of radical chopping. Not to mention you have to decide how important smooth phase response is to you. Some EQs such as the dbx 3231L showed a very smooth phase response but lost a wide section of lower mid frequency power edging up to 1kHz. Other EQs such as the Audient ASP231 in narrow mode lost much less mid frequency power but returned a phase response that was spiky. EQs that retained low mid power usually allowed too much superlow infrabass power to pass as well. A fixed or variable HPF would have cleaned that up nicely.

Much of the time when I see 'Death to 100' on somebody's house or mon curve it is performed on the Klark Teknik DN360. In the graph you can see that a great deal of the mid-freq power is retained with this unit but the phase response is somewhat choppy. Coupled with the 30Hz fixed HPF you would indeed be able to attenuate LF pretty much, but some of the wisest audio experts would choose not to add the choppy phase response you see when bottoming the first few LF faders. Trading 30Hz fixed for variable HPF would be a wonderful change to this industry standard graphic EQ.

Two of the best 'Death to 100' responses came from the Lake Contour and the Rane DEQ 60L in 'Perfect Q' mode -- you can see the frequency responses and phase traces are among the smoothest and there isn't a big bite taken out of the low mids. How ironic it is that these digital units both include a steep Low Cut filter which makes 'Death to 100' completely unnecessary.

A very unusual 'Death to 100' curve comes from the transversal EQ again. You can see a strong dose of filter lift at 125Hz but below that the curve might remind you of a crossover slope. Very odd!