Neve 33122
A discrete three-band EQ module that turns up in odd places, including a stainless-steel rack somebody built by hand.
Overview
The Neve 33122 is a discrete, three-band equalizer module. The clearest picture of it in the period record comes from the classified pages, not a glossy brochure. Through the mid-to-late 1990s, British pro-audio dealers listed the 33122 repeatedly as an outboard module - "all discrete, 3 band" - with stock counts that make collectors wince today: "only 3 left" in one 1997 listing, "only 1 left" in another, "4 in stock" in a third. These were pulled from consoles, racked up, and sold one at a time to engineers who wanted a slice of the Neve EQ sound without buying a desk.
In circuit terms, the 33122 is a three-band equalizer built from discrete components rather than op-amps. The "all discrete" tag the dealers kept repeating was the selling point. The module appears in the period record alongside the 33114, which one 1997 listing describes as a "3 band eq/mic amp discrete," and the older 3114, called "older version of above." That puts the 33122 in the same family of Neve three-band EQ strips. The listings consistently describe the 33122 itself as an EQ module, not an EQ-plus-mic-amp.
The module's second life was in small-format Neve consoles. A 1996 dealer listing for a "Neve 24/6" describes it as carrying "26 x classic, discrete 33122, 3 band eq modules" alongside four compressors/limiters. That is a complete 26-channel desk built around the 33122 as its channel EQ, and it is the most concrete evidence of how the module was deployed.
By the 2000s the 33122 had migrated into project and post rooms. A 2004 studio profile in EQ (August 2004, p.112) lists a pair of Neve 33122s among the mic preamps in a New York music-and-sound-design facility, sitting next to an Avalon VT-737sp, in a room that otherwise ran a Mackie d8b. The same era's classifieds show the other end of the market. One seller offered eight 33122 mic preamps "with sweepable 4 way eq's" mounted in a custom-built grounded stainless steel rack with a built-in 48-volt phantom supply, at $1,800 per channel strip. That listing calls the modules "mic preamps with sweepable 4 way eq's," which conflicts with the dealer descriptions of a plain three-band EQ. It also hints at a cottage industry of racking these modules into standalone strips.
Prices in the period record are scattered and hard to pin down. The 1997 dealer listings show the 33122 quoted at figures that OCR has mangled. One entry reads "£395," and another sits in a column of prices that don't cleanly attach to their line items. Treat any single quoted price from these scans with suspicion. The numbers are there, but the table formatting has scrambled which price belongs to which module. The trajectory is clear, though: modules that were being cleared out by the handful in 1996-97 were, within a few years, being racked eight at a time and sold per channel at four figures in dollars.
The 33122 is discrete, three-band, and unglamorous. Most descriptions give it no mic amp on the module itself and no fancy switching, just the EQ. That means it suits anyone willing to build a rack and supply phantom power externally, and it frustrates anyone expecting a plug-and-play channel strip. The stainless-steel-rack seller did the hard part for eight buyers. Everyone else has to do it themselves.
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