I would definitely go for Waves if you are on a budget - huge bang for buck.  If you are looking to splurge, Fab Filter ProQ2 is brilliant, with the best UI of any plugin I have ever seen.

the Waves one is  excellent value.
 
sonnox is very good with easily selectable different curves and you quickly get accustomed to it but it is expensive (although they have half off sales basically a month every year)
 
Sir Audio has a cool EQ which I bought that is sort of fabfilteresque but much cheaper:
https://www.siraudiotools.com/StandardEQ.php

anydmusic

telecharge

anydmusic
Sure you have considered this, just worth remembering that Quad Curve will work outside of Sonar while you look for a suitable replacement.

I think you might be confusing QuadCurve with LP EQ.

For Pro Channel replacements I'm looking at what is available in Cubase

Cubase has this bad boy, though not really a replacement for the QuadCurve, more a replacement for the Fabfilter Pro Q.

https://youtu.be/e-rLCmlPLWw

also, if you go to s1 the included pro-eq is pretty nice

pwalpwal
also, if you go to s1 the included pro-eq is pretty nice

I agree, this is a very nice EQ. What is doesn't have though are the emulations (e.g. SSL). I might put in a feature request!

Then you have TDR's Nova: http://www.tokyodawn.net/tdr-nova/

Neutron. I've had it for a while but haven't done a ton of work with it... digging back into it now and holy smokes, what an incredible mixing tool it is. The EQ has pretty much everything you could ask for - 12 bands (8 parametric plus lo/hi cut plus low/hi shelving), each band fully configurable with dynamic mode and sidechaining, brilliant interface, analyzer with switchable ruler including piano roll, PLUS real-time inter-track masking analysis, PLUS it's also a full-featured channel strip (twin multiband compressors, exciter, transient shaper), modular for switchable routing, with independent wet/dry for parallel on every element and a built-in limiter, a zero Latency mode, PLUS it will do 'intelligent' track analysis and set itself up for you as a useful starting point if you want it to.
 
And if you only want the EQ (or any other module), you can have that too.
 
And it sounds great.
 
I think it's basically 90% of what I need for bread and butter mixing in one product. And I'm not even on the latest version. Yikes. 

@subtlearts  - Thx for the reminder. Took a brief look at Neutrino when they were giving it away, didn't think much of it.
 
I'm looking for an EQ I can drop on 40+ tracks. The comparison notes the EQ "available as plugin" is only a feature of the high end bundle ($400 on sale), which implies that for the other bundles it would have to be inserted with a "kitchen sink" configuration for each track. iZotope has a bit of a  rep for being a CPU hog.
 
What has your experience been with CPU hit for Neutron?

Chandler
 
Check out a vid I did covering it a while ago.

http://youtu.be/VuVcH7Gq5x8
 

Good work on the video. Reminds me why I should stick just with Melda and forget the rest!  :)

jackson white
@subtlearts  - Thx for the reminder. Took a brief look at Neutrino when they were giving it away, didn't think much of it.
 
I'm looking for an EQ I can drop on 40+ tracks. The comparison notes the EQ "available as plugin" is only a feature of the high end bundle ($400 on sale), which implies that for the other bundles it would have to be inserted with a "kitchen sink" configuration for each track. iZotope has a bit of a  rep for being a CPU hog.
 
What has your experience been with CPU hit for Neutron?

Hey... Well I'm pretty sure I couldn't run 40 instances of the full Neutron on my system, but it's pretty old at this point, and perhaps others could. The full plug running all modules is not super-easy on the CPU, it's true. But it's pretty amazing, and personally I tend to use smaller track counts than that anyway, so it's tough for me to say.
 
Yes I have the Advanced version of it (came with Music Production Bundle which I got on a pretty sweet special last year) so I can use just the EQ separately, which is a lot lighter but probably not the lightest EQ around. I'm not sure I would use it on 40 tracks even if I could, or had 40 tracks to run it on... unless I really needed the masking features desperately, which is hard to imagine. I would likely use something lighter in many cases - I haven't checked it against Melda, which is also pretty sophisticated - and it's hard to beat the price point!
 
Neutrino... yeah, it's not really a professional tool, but I could imagine it being useful for a quick drop in kind of thing. But I've never actually used it for anything.