DigiTech MEQ-14
Ninety-nine memories, one button, and a 1990 TEC Award nomination - DigiTech's stereo graphic EQ with MIDI recall.
Overview
DigiTech's pitch for the MEQ-14 was simple: "99 memory locations and one button. That's it." The company's own advertising ran repeatedly through Mix in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It promised you'd set your levels, push a button, and the MEQ-14 would do the rest. Recall was a single touch, and programming lit the settings on LEDs that a button press then locked in. Whether the reality was quite that frictionless or not, the idea was clear: a stereo graphic EQ with real MIDI control and patch memory, for people who wanted to stop redrawing curves by hand.
The unit is a 2/3-octave stereo graphic equalizer with 14 bands per channel, using 12 dB of cut and boost. Fourteen bands per side at 2/3-octave spacing gives you broad strokes rather than surgical notching. That's the trade-off a graphic EQ of this type makes. The headline numbers are a 90 dB signal-to-noise ratio, less than 0.03% THD, and a 20 Hz to 20 kHz bandwidth. Those are respectable figures for a graphic EQ of the period, and they suggest DigiTech wasn't cutting corners on the analog side just because the control surface was digital.
The memory and MIDI implementation are what separate the MEQ-14 from a plain graphic EQ. It stores 99 memory locations, and DigiTech's advertising emphasized non-volatile memory, so your curves survive a power cycle. Each channel has independent MIDI access, which means the two sides can be addressed and controlled separately over MIDI instead of being locked together as a stereo pair. The frequency centers are standard ISO. There's also a full security lock-out system, handy in a live or install situation where you don't want someone bumping a stored curve mid-show.
DigiTech's ads tout "EQ curve comparison," and the description credits the MEQ-14 with what it calls the first constant EQ curve readout. That's a useful feature on a programmable EQ. Being able to see and compare stored curves beats blindly recalling numbers.
The MEQ-14 wasn't a niche curiosity. It was nominated in the Signal Processing Technology category of the 1990 TEC Awards, according to Mix (July 1990, p.71). It also turns up in working studios: a Mix studio profile of Sound Spa Recording in Edison, New Jersey, lists a pair of MEQ-14s in the outboard rack alongside a much deeper pile of compressors and EQs.
DigiTech built the MEQ-14 as part of a small family of MIDI-programmable equalizers. The same advertising also names the four-channel MEQ 7 (a 1-1/3-octave quad graphic) and the single-channel MEQ 28 (a 1/3-octave single graphic). The MEQ-14 sits in the middle as the stereo 2/3-octave option, for a stereo bus or a pair of channels where you want program memory but don't need four zones or third-octave resolution. DigiTech was a DOD Electronics Corp. trademark at the time, and the ads carry a 1989 DOD copyright along with a Salt Lake City, Utah address and a "Manufactured in the U.S.A." line.
The MEQ-14 is a clean example of late-1980s American rack gear built around the then-new idea that a graphic EQ should be programmable and remotely controllable. The 99 memories, the independent per-channel MIDI, the non-volatile storage, and the security lock-out all point at the same use: a fixed installation or a live rig where you want repeatable EQ without a tech babysitting the rack. The 12 dB cut/boost and 2/3-octave spacing make it a shaping tool, not a fix for narrow resonances.
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