[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

I once (briefly) used a pro electronic crossover in my system that had a list price of close to $500 that had excellent specs, but it noticeably degraded and colored the sound.

Specs are nice, but they aren’t necessarily the be-all, end-all. For instance, specs won’t tell you if a component is prone to picking up noise from adjacent equipment in the rack. The cheap equalizers that the pro audio guys won’t even use as paperweights have decent specs on paper. I recently came across a user review of one complaining how noisy it was, even in bypass mode, despite its excellent published noise spec.

I trust Rane’s specs as being more reliable than the lower-end pro brands, and I don’t expect noise radiating in from adjacent gear to be a problem in a home installation. I’m just saying don’t perfunctorily expect a relatively inexpensive piece of pro gear to be as pristine as we’re used to seeing in home audio, as I did when I bought that crossover.

A good test you can perform when you get the Ranes, run pink noise through your system and switch the EQ in and out of bypass, with all single filters off (probably best to do this with a single channel, since you’re dealing with two equalizers). If you hear any timbre shift in the tone, then the equalizer is coloring the sound before any filters are added. That would be a deal breaker right there, IMO.

Another crude test, with no signal, turn the volume up high enough to hear the background hiss and switch the EQ in and out of bypass (again, with all filters switched off). This will let you know if the equalizer is as quiet as the rest of your gear. Of course, if any added noise isn’t audible at normal listening volume settings, then it’s not that big of a deal, but it’s good to know what you’re dealing with. Remember, any boosting filters you might use are going to add noise at the adjusted frequency, in the dB value of the boost, so it’s important for the EQ to have a quiet noise floor before equalizing.

Good luck, and let us know how things turn out.

Regards,
Wayne