The units nobody made famous

Backwards through the decades

My first vintage EQ surprised me. It had all the things people mean by a vintage sound, the noise, the loss of top end, the blur, but not the way vintage-inspired plugins had led me to expect: smooth without going dull, huge at the bottom without going flabby. That part of a chopped-up 1970s console didn't sound old at all. It sounded classy.

But what changed how I work wasn't the sound. It was the front panel. Three knobs, period. Instead of an hour nudging one band around in Pro-Q, I set the response I was after and moved on. Mixing got easy.

So I kept going backwards. The 70s, then the 60s, then the 1950s, where I've mostly stayed. Everything that arrived got compared against what was already here, and whatever sounded less exciting went back to eBay. The more I heard, the clearer it got: the most popular devices are not the ones that sound best.

A quest for the obscure, and a leap of faith

These aren't units you can go out and try. There's no model name to search for, because nobody made them famous. The hunt happens on forums, on local auction sites in whichever country the thing was built in, and on eBay or Reverb.

What I learned to trust was the maker. A 1950s workshop building for a national broadcaster or a film studio built to a sound, not a budget: tubes, transformers, inductors, nothing cheap anywhere in the path. So I'd place a bid, wait for the thing to turn up, spend a few months servicing it, and find out whether I was right (fingers crossed!).

A different design philosophy

Next to a modern EQ these units are limited. What they carry instead is a different design philosophy. In the 1950s and 60s most studios were state-owned, so the makers could chase what they believed was the best possible sound. Today, whatever you build, somebody has to pay for in the end. Winding custom transformers to spec, picking components because they sound great: hard to square with a marketing-led industry.

One such device was made by the Soviet company KINAP some time between 1949 and 1952. Fewer than 40 were made. KINAP was the Soviet Klangfilm, building equipment for the film industry. The movie industry was big in the USSR, and so is this equalizer: larger than an adult's head, with huge coils and transformers and a sound to match.

I got a pair from a studio in Kharkiv, a year before Russia invaded Ukraine. Relics of simpler times, as sweet as they are heartbreaking. The design is European: shelves at the top and the bottom, and a boost-only middle knob that lifts the highs turned right and the lows turned left. What makes it interesting is how that knob interacts with the shelves, so you can cut and boost similar ranges at once. Sounds like a Pultec idea, doesn't it? And yet the sound is nothing like a Pultec. Which to me is a good thing.

That's one device in the collection. Each of them is a story: a search for the perfect sound that happened over 70 years ago, repeated by me, and now shared with you.

Kolor is where these units ended up, and the trial runs on your own tracks, free, with no time limit.