[Dean Roddey]

I do agree in general that you can emulate EQs pretty well. I posted a thread a while back (which I think got lost in the forum crash early this month), where I showed the emulation of the Waves SSL EQ using RenEQ.

The Waves SSL has a built in high shelf starting in the mids, which I assume therefore the real ones also have, which may contribute to their more aggressive sound. It's there even when the EQ is flat.

And their Qs are very broad. The thinner Qs on the SSL EQ were about as big as the widest ones you could get on RenEQ.

And of course that's another thing. Unless you have a pretty flexible EQ, you may not be able to create Qs as sharp or as wide as another one you want to emulate. And since pre/post filter ring can change based on the depth and steepness of the cut/boost, that could take a fair amount of manual twiddling you wouldn't necessarily want to have to do, relative to just using an EQ that already has those characteristics built in. EQs like FilterBank and the Kjaerhus GEQ-7 have a number of settings that allowyou to control these things and get a lot of different types of sounds.

The SSL stuff also I'm pretty sure adds harmonic content, particularly if the analog switch is on, as do the API ones I think, though I've not measured eitther of them.