I had been finding that digital EQ and compression weren’t actually improving my sound if I listened objectively at equal apparent volume, so I got out some analogue I had stashed away probably out of laziness or some idiocy and found that in the analog domain I could actually improve the sound.
I’m using
an EQ131 that doesn’t have a brand name on it that I got from some site in Australia;
a Boss RCL-10 compressor. It can also expand and gate, but I haven’t used it for those purposes;
a Behringer desk with Xenyx preamps that I sometimes overdrive for saturation.
I’m less familiar with analogue signal processing, but my belief is that the reason digital EQ harms the audio is because of the unintended phase manipulation of the partials by the digital signal processing algorithms used. Why digital compression doesn’t seem to help is harder to determine.