Black Q - V4 Black Friday Deal 2026: $19, 75% off

Black Q Black Friday pricing from Tone Empire takes 75% off the V4 EQ plugin, which puts it at $19 until Nov 25, 2026.

Black Q - V4 is a four-band EQ with circuit drive. It started as a hardware build: six months of work with real tubes and Sowter and Lundahl iron, ending in a unit that Tone Empire then modeled path by path.

In V4, that tone stays intact while the surrounding channel strip is designed to support it. The maker says it stays light enough to sit on every track.

What are the five drive circuits in Black Q V4?

DRIVE moves from a faint glow to proper saturation through whichever circuit you pick. All five sit on one selector, so comparing old and new is a single flick.

• A and B: the same pair of transformer paths carried over from V3
• IRON: a compact steel core that holds onto the bass and begins to saturate quickly
• NICKEL: a large, soft-sounding core with a gentle, rounded character
• PENT: a pentode output stage feeding its own transformer

All three of the new stages are live circuit models, calculated in real time instead of being curve-fitted.

Every circuit runs oversampled from 1x to 16x. Switching between them never clicks, because the change happens in a few milliseconds of darkness before the audio returns.

How do the four bands work?

LOW is a shelf from 50 to 200 Hz. The MID band runs from 100 Hz up to 3 kHz, while HIGH spans 600 Hz through 16 kHz. Since those ranges share a stretch of frequencies, both bell filters can be placed on the same trouble spot. The AIR band works as a high shelf reaching the top of the audible range at 20 kHz, while every band can be boosted or cut by 10 dB and switched in or out independently.

Each frequency knob is tinted in its band's colour. That colour repeats on the band's key and on its curve in the analyzer.

Linear phase, mid/side and the SCOPE deck

LIN applies the same curve with no phase shift, for mastering and anything that has to stay phase-coherent. M/S works in mid and side. The channel keys give each channel its own EQ and drive settings: BOTH keeps them linked, while L/M and R/S edit one side and leave the other as you set it.

Press SCOPE and a second panel slides out under the main one. The display draws the overall EQ curve, tints every band's individual share in a matching colour, and places the resulting output spectrum underneath. Close it and the window shrinks back.

Output, MIX, DRIFT and presets

The output level shows on a meter made of two LED rows. MIX sets the balance between the processed sound and the dry signal, which is kept in time with it. DRIFT adds the slight differences in components you would hear between two real units, along with a gradual temperature-driven shift.

AUTO on the top strip matches output loudness to input, so you judge tone and not volume.

Black Q - V4 ships with 200 presets in total. Half are new, sorted by task: sections for voice, percussion, low end, guitar, keyboards and synth lines, the master bus, final mastering, saturation and tone shaping, corrective work, and stereo or mid/side handling. The other half is the complete V3 factory collection, updated to work in this version. Your own V3 presets import too. Search, favorites, A/B, undo and redo are built in.

Installing next to V3

Black Q IV installs beside V3. Your V3 sessions keep opening with V3, your Black Q license activates IV, and IV reads your V3 presets.

Latency stays fixed and is reported to the sample in every mode. Knob turns and band changes stay silent, with no audible steps, and POWER fades smoothly between its states.