7 Low Pass Filters Go Head-To-Head

US MPCs, Ensoniq Mirage, MAM Warp 9 and more 12/03/24

Comparing the sonic characteristics of gear is often an interesting experience, and easily done with synths - but how often do you get to compare like for like effects? Here we have a side-by-side comparison of 7 hardware low pass filters, with the Electrix Filter Factory, Behringer Model D, MPC 2000XL, MAM WARP 9, Electrix Filter Queen, MPC 1000 and Ensoniq Mirage. Here is some infor form the videos creator:

I made this video with the simple desire to compare the sonic qualities of each filter with the same (or close enough) settings. I did a sweep from bottom to top and back to bottom during a 4 bar drum loop at 3 different resonance settings (No res, Mid res, Hi res).

Mind you, all of them have different interfaces and response, the filter is tuned more musical in some of them, some of them overdrive real nasty, some of them have a speaker-cone-killer resonance, some are manually sweepable without any envelopes, others are only sweepable through envelope, some have CV or MIDI, some don't etc.

Some filters considerably drop volume when the resonance is cranked up, some others will go into crazy self oscillation, which I ommitted for this video, so I went for whatever sonic ground is common for ALL OF THEM, and also I normalized each clip to have consistent audio throughout the video.

Wrapping it up, this is not to show which one is better, is just for you to hear and see a side by side test, and if you want, you can share here which one you like better and whatever reason you might have :)

Awesome stuff! Which one doe you prefer?

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About the author [midierror]: midierror makes nifty Max For Live devices, innovative music hardware, award winning sample packs and hosts a podcast speaking to people in the music world.