It does depend on what styles you use them for imo. For Graphic EQ pedals the ones I’ve kept have been a vintage blue MXR 10 band, Boss GE-10, Ibanez GE-601 and ‘70’s Big Jam SE-6. These are all vintage pedals and so have a more inherently organic and warm color to their sound where 99.9% of recent pedals will color the tone with a more sterile, bland somewhat filtered flavored (a few exceptions)
The Ibanez has better quality tone in the midrange, but not as much range as the others or as good in the lows or highs as the MXR or Boss. The Boss sounds the most powerful and punchy and has the most range to shape the eq, but the tone itself is not as good or organic. The MXR blue is a good middle ground of the 2. The Big Jam has the most inherent warmth and maybe more organic, but is always to me inherently dark and soft sounding. I only use it for cleans, but it can be excellent
Then you have PQ’s that I use more like an od pedal to boosts. Best ones IME are a ‘70’s Furman PQ3 (green panel/silver knobs, Audio Arts 4100, and Intersound PRV-1, these are all rack units. Haven’t found yet a pq pedal that’s half as good unfortunately. The Empress PQ especially I was disappointed in. Very clinical/cold sounding with ugly tonal artifacts around the notes
Many of the stuff I recommended can be noisy, but in terms of tone quality they’ve been the ones I liked most so far and I can manage it. For whatever reason a lot of pedals with less noise tend to also have more filtered, worse tone
