The Clariphonic doesn't look like any other EQ, either. It's a 1U rack design in the signature Kush Audio colours — a warm, muted brown with yellow highlights (Kush's full philosophy of 'general aesthetic eccentricities' can be found on their web site), and is small and neat, with just four chicken‑head control knobs, five small, silvered three‑way toggle switches for each channel, and three two‑way toggles in the centre. The rear panel has both balanced and unbalanced input and output connections, and a switch on each channel to choose between them.

Signals coming into the Clariphonic are split into six paths to allow for the parallel processing that lies at the heart of this design. Two, which form the FF path, go direct to a summing bus, and remain untouched. The other four go to the Focus and Clarity 'engines', where they're processed before being sent to the same output bus as the FF signal.

If that sounds confusing, the signal flow diagram overleaf should make this much clearer! In short, the design means that at the output the summed stereo signal is made up of one element which is entirely unprocessed, one that has passed only through the Focus engine, and another that has passed only through the Clarity engine.

The chicken‑head knobs provide gain control for each engine, and this determines the blend of the two that will be summed with the FF‑path signal. To hear just what those engines are doing to the signal, it is possible to kill the FF path. This is an interesting exercise in itself, but one which can be given some greater purpose by the possibility of splitting the signal in a DAW or mixing desk prior to feeding it to the Clariphonic, further manipulating the non‑FF blend (with compression, for example), and then mixing that back in with the original signal (although obviously this cannot be accomplished inside the Clariphonic itself).

So within each channel there are the two engines, but within each engine there are further choices. In the Focus engine, these are of two different shelf frequencies (Lift and Open), and two different shapes (Tight or Diffuse); and in the Clarity engine there's a choice of four shelves called Presence, Sheen, Shimmer and Silk. Although these qualitative labels seem cute and cuddly, I have to say that at first I found the lack of quantified information a tad irritating and potentially limiting — even though the manual provides approximate corner frequencies (respectively 800Hz and 3, 5, 9, 19 and 39 kHz), and an approximate description of the shapes (Diffuse is a normal shelving plateau, whereas Tight is "a gigantic Bell shape… gently falling off in the neighbourhood of 14kHz”).

MPN: CLARIPHONIC
UPC: 860754000202

• 2-channel parallel equalizer
  
• Splits incoming audio into 6 parallel paths: 2 x Clarity engines, 2 x Focus engines, and 2 x Full Frequency direct though paths
  
• Boost only EQ architecture
  
• Full set of front-panel controls
  
• Perfect for mixes and individual stems