Grappadura wrote:also, someone might come up with a rack that matches the settings of a waves or whatever product. This would be freely distributable. It would be cool if people of the community buildt those and made spectrum-comparisons of the rack and the original effect behaviour. You could stay all native but still have the power of the best products on the market (i guess because of the assymetric curves and other programming factors this is not entirely possible yet, yet you should be able to get some pretty accurate emulations).
you could do it - and in fact the info in the manuals could get you most of the way there - if you read what I posted from the Waves RenEQ manual originally they emulated the behaviour of the Pultec EQ with the Q10 just by recreating the curves
but as others have said, it is a time consuming task, and uses up a lot of bands and what kind of method would you use to determine how similar it is?
also - one of the things that thes e EQs have done to recreate those they are modelled on is use the assymetric bell curves which means, for example, that when you boost it has a wider bandwidth but if you cut it is narrower, or vice versa - can you imagine having to readjust a number of different filters at once just to change the curve because you now want to cut instead of boost?
I guess you could have 'cut' and 'boost' presets, but then you have many different types of these curves according to the different hardware EQs, and as the Sonnox manual says, Sonnox actually provided 4 different EQ types or modes to do this for different EQs
all this is before you even look at the types of saturation etc
at the end of the day, you can probably do anything at all with a DAW (Robert from Ableton has been on these forums saying as much) but the reality of doing it, how long it takes and having the knowledge and experience necessary to do it properly, that's a different story
that doesn't mean it's not a good area to explore, in fact it could be well worth looking into because you'll learn a lot, but it will take a lot of time
begs the question, do you want to be a musician, engineer, or developer?