The Marantz 2130 is one of the most beautiful tuners ever made: a quartz-locked FM/AM stereo tuner with Marantz's mesmerising oscilloscope display showing signal strength, multipath and tuning, all wrapped...

The Sony VT-M5 is the kind of gadget you would expect in a Cold War surveillance van or on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Billed as an Audioscope...

The Sherman Filterbank is the cult Belgian effect that producers reach for when they want something to sound dangerous. Run drums, synths, vocals, anything through its screaming, self-oscillating multimode filters...

Victor (JVC's home-market brand) made some of the prettiest hi-fi gear of the era, and the SEA-60 is exhibit A: a stereo graphic equaliser with a mesmerising blue spectrum-analyser display...

If a record sounds good on NS-10s, it sounds good everywhere, which is why these white-coned Yamahas ended up on the meter bridge of nearly every serious studio on earth....

The Yamaha M-80 is a serious natural-sound stereo power amplifier: plenty of clean watts, a striking black fascia with glowing level meters, and that composed, effortless Yamaha delivery. Built to...

A heavyweight from the golden era of Japanese hi-fi. The Yamaha B-4 is a Natural Sound stereo power amplifier from 1978, built as two symmetrical mono amplifiers in one 21kg...

Some studio boxes are famous; the Dimension D is famous for being invisible. Roland's SDD-320 does not warble or swirl like an ordinary chorus; it uses two synced bucket-brigade delay...

The Yamaha MG124C is the workhorse 12-channel analog mixer that turns up everywhere for good reason: clean Yamaha mic preamps, musical 3-band EQ, built-in compression on the mono channels and...

The M5000 was TC's flagship Digital Audio Mainframe, a modular, software-upgradable processing platform that became a studio benchmark for reverb in the 90s and never really left. Engineers still rank...

Here is a slice of 1970s hi-fi ambition you rarely see: a discrete four-channel integrated amplifier from JVC's Victor line, complete with a built-in quadraphonic decoder and circuitry to handle...

When your MIDI rig sprouts more modules than your desk can handle, the Roland M-240R steps in: twenty-four channels of line mixing in a rack, with the clean, quiet Roland...

The Boss BX-600 is a tidy little six-channel stereo mixer from Roland's Boss line: gain, pan, effect send and volume per channel, a built-in effect loop and that dependable 80s...

Tune your system by eye and ear. The Yamaha EQ-630 is a Natural Sound stereo graphic equalizer from 1989, and a properly sophisticated one: ten bands per channel with fully...

The Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo is the final, fullest evolution of the Space Echo line, and if you only ever own one tape echo, the faithful agree this is the...

The Yamaha MV802 is a compact rackmount line mixer, perfect for folding extra synths, modules or effects returns into your setup without burning channels on the big desk. Simple, clean...

The Maschine MK3 is Native Instruments' flagship groove production system: 16 velocity-sensitive pads, two crisp colour screens, a big browse-and-tweak encoder and deep integration with a massive sound library. Finger-drum,...

The Yamaha Q1131 is a professional 1/3-octave graphic equaliser: thirty-one bands of precise tone control for tuning rooms, taming feedback, or carving a signal exactly how you want it. Built...

The 1604-VLZ Pro is the mixer that earned Mackie its reputation: sixteen channels of clean, high-headroom analog with the famous XDR mic preamps, flexible four-bus routing, musical 3-band EQ and...

The TEAC/Tascam M-30 is a proper early-80s all-analog 8-channel console, the kind of warm, characterful little mixer people buy precisely to take the cold edge off digital recordings. It was...

The Yamaha EM-90A is what happens when an organ, a rhythm box and a 70s lounge act throw a cocktail party and accidentally record the whole thing to 8-track. It...

The Roland Juno-106 is the definitive affordable analog polysynth: six voices, that gorgeous DCO-plus-chorus sound, a slider for everything and full MIDI. The pads, basses and stabs on half the...

Yamaha's only real assault on the late-80s sampler wars, the TX16W is a 12-bit rack sampler with a character all its own: grainy, punchy, and (whisper it) arguably more pleasant...

The Victor/JVC SEA-80 is one of the prettiest pieces of vintage hi-fi you can put in a rack: a 10-band-per-channel stereo graphic equalizer from 1979 with a built-in, glowing fluorescent...