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Reviews For: W2IHY 8 Band Audio Equalizer / Noise Gate

Category: Audio Accessories for Transmitter & Receiver

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Review Summary For : W2IHY 8 Band Audio Equalizer / Noise Gate
Reviews: 203MSRP: 249.99 assembled or 204.99 kit
Description:
8 band equalizer and noise gate
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.w2ihy.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
002034.9
PC4U Rating: 2006-08-14
great service!! good product!! Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
there is no need to say many words about this product. See for yourself on all the good reviews. GREAT product!!

I bought the 8 band equalizer secondhand last summer and while connecting it to my rig I found some RFI problems and also a bad working mic -in gain control on the back of the Equalizer. My friend ON4JW took the 8 band EQ with him on his trip to the states and arranged a meeting with Julius. Within one day Julius replaced the rear interconnect board, put a change on that better adjust the output of the 8 band EQ and also a change on to improve the RF immunity of the unit. And all those things with no charge!

My friend ON4JW brought it back and everything is working super now. Working with the 8 band EQ , the EQ plus and the Heil PR40 I'm having a super studiosound.

Julius is definitely a one in a million when it comes to service to his customers, and his product quality is superb. I wish everyone is working that way. Excellent job Julius.

Marc, PC4U
The Netherlands
KF2GG Rating: 2006-08-02
Fantastic Item - W2IHY 8 Band EQ Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I read all reviews here on Eham about W2IHY EQ and decided to buy one.

I bought one, and it arrived and did not work. I called Julius (W2IHY) and told him about my problem. He asked me how everything was hooked up and told me that it could be either the cable or EQ. So he said he was going to send me out a NEW box and NEW cable right away. He couldn't have been more courteous.

To my surprise, the very NEXT day, it arrived in the mail.

I have never had such fast, courteous service in my life.

Even though he is quite busy, he spent ample time on the phone with me and even gave me a great microphone site.

I am one satisfied customer, would highly recommend him and would certainly buy from again.

I am spreading the "GOOD" word!

Thanks! KF2GG
N2MTM Rating: 2006-06-23
Great Great Great Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I got my Eq today and without say nothing to my fellows on 20 meter they star asking me what i did with my audio. I tested today on a pile up and guess what, first call i got it. If you want to sound great you have to try this.

Mike
VE3TMT Rating: 2006-06-21
Simply Amazing Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Well I finally sent my money off to Julius and ordered the wonder box. Hooked up to my TS850 the difference is amazing. I can only imagine what it would do for a Heil! No sense in repeating what has already been said, just go out and buy one, you won't regret it. It is a little bigger than I thought but fits coomfortably on the operating desk. Other retailers hsould take lessons from Julius, his service is second to none.
W3DMT Rating: 2006-06-10
You won't be dissappointed! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
I met Julius this weekend at HamCom. I bought my box on Friday, went home and had problems with a cable that I had made. I went back to try to purchase one on Saturday and he gave it to me. Then I told him I was going to ad a PR40 to the mix and he tried to give me that cable too! He finally let me pay for one of the 2 cables (Mic Cables). I got home, plugged it all in, and was just in awe as to how good it sounded.

Fired up the HF rig, and it all worked so flawlessly, and the comments on my audio were the best I've ever received.

This box is something special. The owner of this company is even more special. We need more ham radio companies like this and products of this quality level!
WA4CDI Rating: 2006-05-21
Money Well Spent Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
There's not much else to add after reading the other reviews. I concur with them all. Dollar for Dollar, the 8-band EQ has made the most signifcant contribution to improving my audio chain. Everything about it works as advertised and more! The next step is to add the EQ Plus to Accommodate multiple transceivers.
73
WA4CDI

W4VD Rating: 2006-05-13
Amazing device Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
They should make Julius put "warning may be habit forming" stickers on these things. I got a refurbed unit that had a few issues last week, he shipped a new one before I could object, he gave such a price break it really was too generous on his part, I got it in 2 days, and it was much better than the reburb, but I was having issues with driving it, it was very hard to keep the ALC in range and the mic gain and MIC OUT on the EQ were at min settings and it was still trying to go off the ALC scale and I could only get a few nice rag chewing sounds, so Julius informs me he has sent a HiZ cable to try on my Goldline GM4 and TS-940S. WOW, I knew as soon as I set it up that High Z cable I knew it was the ticket since I could bring the ALC down properly with the eq's mic out control and my mic gain was at about 9-10 o'clock like it should be. I really doubted that anything could do better than that HC4 element and the 940's processor for a DX mode on this station, I have gotten a lot of compliments on that audio, but like all the others said you can get about any sound you want out of this thing even nice punch in the audio like a HC4 or 5 and sound processed without one, and I do believe it's cleaner audio too, and I can see I am gonna have to get the EQ Plus as soon as I master this 8 band, and that could take some time, there is a lot of flexibilty in there. I would recommend it over the 2 band even if you're just getting into external audio gear, this is the perfect unit for beginners and Pros alike, just add a EQ Plus later on, and wait for any new products from Julius, the Plus would be really nice with multiple rigs having 3 outputs and a front panel output control, ez swapping, you could have that high dollar mic on three rigs instead of one.

The noise gate is amazing, like magic as some others posted. I turned it off talking to a chap and he said it was like a 747 had parked in my shack with it off, and the delay is so slick the listener can't even tell you're running it if you adjust it right. Anyone who has a problem with this noise gate has a problem in the settings or a bad unit, I had as bad a noise problem as anyone could with all these PC's in my shack and the amp. Actually the PC's are so loud you can't even hear the amp for them, but all that's history now, the noise gate is like getting in a sound proof booth with your mic. The improvement in the audio from it is very noticable, lot's of "presence".

Main thing is to properly adjust the Mic IN and OUT properly, and if your's is touchy like mine on setup you probably need to change to the other impedence cable. I must say it made a huge difference on the 940 using HiZ cable on a Goldline, the rig has a wide range input 600-50K but Juluis said it looked like the HiZ might be better and he was dead on the money. He really goes to the extreme to assure every customer is completely delighted with his products, or he refunds your money, what more can you ask?

He replaced refurbed unit with a brand new one and even included return shipping, now tell me where else is there service like that? I think Julius has TenTec's legendary service beat.

And what he says about improving your rig by simply hooking it up and setting the mic levels is very true, on the wide range element and no processing my audio was terrible, last night I was calling CQ and admiring the audio, made an adjustment and nothing happened, and the EQ was turned OFF. That's the improvement I saw just in connecting it correctly, before the EQ there is NO WAY I could have called CQ with the wide ele and no processing and ADMIRED the audio, the audio was THAT bad without processing, now it's quite good not even using the EQ, but if you want to impress someone, flipped it on and off when you find those "sweet spots" and see what they say. Put it in DX mode and cut off the noise gate, it truly is impressive.
Just go to www.w2ihy.com and rest assured every word on it is true, except in reality it may be a little BETTER than they claim on the site.

Keep it up Julius and thanks for all the help.
N2XD Rating: 2006-04-08
Outstanding Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
This will be short.Great product,Great service,Great person to deal with.
K7RAN Rating: 2006-04-01
Superb product & top-notch service Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I use the W2IHY 8-Band Equilizer as well as the W2IHY EQ Plus unit. The difference in my transmitted audio is like night and day: Others think I've kicked in an amplifier. Moreover, the manufacturer W2IHY, Julius Jones, has been amazingly responsive, even going so far as to hand-make an adapter cable I needed (because I wanted to do something relatively unusual, a description/explanation of which would be beyond the purview of this review). Suffice to say, Julius went way beyond what was required, including a couple of lengthy telephone consultations, to help me meet my goals. I heartily recommend both the product as well as its creator. -- Randy K7RAN
W6LBV Rating: 2006-03-30
Not a Kit Project for Beginners Time Owned: more than 12 months.
An overwhelmingly favorable set of reviews over the years has permanently set the ranking of this product, and I certainly agree with the huge majority of reviewers about its excellent design and performance. Even with a fine microphone (Heil Classic) and a radio known for audio quality (Kenwood), using the eight band equalizer makes an appreciable difference. Therefore I write about a different aspect of the audio equalizer.

For more than fifty years I have successfully built electronics kits from all the major vendors: Heathkit, EICO, Knight Kit, Dynaco, and other more specialized suppliers. Not having built any kits in the past decade, however, I wanted to start a new project. Three years ago I ordered the kit version of the W2IHY eight band equalizer. Working slowly and cautiously over the months, I spent about twenty to twenty-five hours at various times on this. This week I finished and tested it, and I have some comments specifically reserved for the kit version of the product.

I fully echo and amplify the few previous reviews which observed that this is not a beginner's kit project. If you don't have at least a moderate amount of board-level electronics construction and repair experience, you probably should not attempt building this kit. The pre-built version of the product is only an additional $45; consider it money well spent.

The kit consists of an completely (parts) unpopulated "mother board," a slightly populated "slide pot equalizer board," and a half-populated "I/O connector board" plus case, power supply, etc. These boards are small and are crowded with components when complete. Your task: fully populate all the boards with supplied parts, and then do all the interconnection wiring

To build the kit, you will need a miniature soldering iron (no more than fifteen watts!), a good combination optical magnifier and work-holder fixture, and miniature tools (long-nose pliers, side-cutter, screwdrivers, etc.) Don't try it without the proper tools!

The resistors and capacitors included in the kit are small and their color-codings and printed values are very hard to read without magnification (which probably would still be needed even for younger eyes than mine). In a few cases the choice of the correct part is critical: there are several non-polarized capacitors on the mother board with the same capacitance value as polarized electrolytics on the same board. The PC resistor networks all appear identical without magnification. I had to correct an installation error involving these parts, probably made because I didn't have sufficient magnification at the time.

Overall, with a proper set of tools the parts stuffing isn't too difficult, just time consuming. Installing the interconnect wiring, however, becomes dicey. Some board solder pads are in difficult to solder locations, and some of the leads from the three LEDs have no fixed tie points for connection to the point-to-point wiring. Toward the end of the project the construction manual abandons the traditional "step by step directions" completely and tells the builder to finish the point-to-point wiring on his own, using the color drawing in the book. This is tricky work, and it requires considerable attention to detail.

The most error-prone construction steps are at the end, when a flat-ribbon multi-conductor cable has to be installed between two boards, using sixteen pin headers on the cable and some additional direct wiring of unterminated cable conductors to pads on the boards. The drawings in the manual are not as clear or detailed as they could be, and because of misinterpretations I made two mistakes in the wiring. Each required about an hour's troubleshooting to find and to correct. Finally, after finishing the wiring several more hours of troubleshooting were required to locate an intermittent PC board trace and to bridge it. This included a personal phone call from Julius to steer me in the right direction.

It finally all worked as it should. And "as it should" is very good indeed! The on-air effect of using equalization that has been tailored specifically for my voice is very high quality audio (according to received reports) and an improvement in the average (not the peak!) transmitted ssb modulation level that is "operationally equivalent" to perhaps 6-8 dB of speech compression.

This is a very worthwhile and useful product, and W2IHY's support for it is simply "over the top!" But the construction job is probably more than many hams would want to take on. While I have improved my electronics construction skills by successfully completing the kit, the total cost "savings" amounted to about $2/construction hour, not including fatigue and frustration. Consider buying the factory-built product.