The Monster 2 is exactly what it sounds like: a boutique Polish dual-channel beast that bolts a fast FET compressor to a NOS-tube saturation stage and a parallel mix knob,...

Before digital reverb took over, the MICMIX Master Room was the spring reverb serious studios reached for: a big, lush, three-dimensional spring sound far richer than the tanks built into...

The Sony SRA-3 is the all-valve recording amplifier that quietly became one of the most hunted secret weapons in modern psych. Built in the 1960s to ride alongside Sony's reel-to-reel...

The EPS 16 Plus is Ensoniq's 1990 sampling workstation and a low-key legend of golden-era hip-hop. It samples at 16-bit with that warm, slightly gritty Ensoniq character, and its killer...

The AKG BX20E is the king of spring reverbs: a torsional transmission-line spring system in its own substantial cabinet, giving long, lush, three-dimensional decays that sit somewhere between a plate...

Roland's SRV-2000 is a 1U slice of mid-80s digital reverb that has aged into a proper character box. It pairs early digital reverb algorithms with a built-in 3-band parametric EQ,...

The Behringer Composer Pro is the workhorse dynamics box that's lived in budget racks forever, and for good reason: two channels of compressor, peak limiter, expander and gate with the...

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...

The Warm Audio WA76 is a faithful, fully-discrete take on the legendary 1176 FET compressor, the one that has slammed drums, vocals and bass on countless hit records. Lightning-fast attack,...

Before everyone had a thousand soft-samplers in a laptop, you had a rack, a floppy disk, and twelve glorious bits. The Akai S950 is the box that chopped the breaks...

Before the SPX90 ruled the world, Yamaha's REV7 was the studio's go-to digital reverb: the rackmount sibling of the legendary SPX, with lush, glassy halls and plates that defined the...

Roland's 12-bit rack sampler from the late 80s. The S-330 packs the same characterful converters as its keyboard siblings into a tidy 1U box, complete with that gritty, slightly lo-fi...

The Joemeek SC4 brings the cult British photo-optical compression sound to the stereo bus: smooth, vibey gain reduction that flatters mixes, drums and vocals with character rather than clinical control.The...

Ask a roomful of engineers to name one compressor they cannot live without and a scary number will say the Distressor. Since 1995, Dave Derr's EL8 has been the go-to...

The Planet Phatt is E-MU's love letter to hip-hop, trip-hop and old-school R&B. Built on the same respected sound engine as the Proteus range, it is loaded with fat analog-style...

Every studio eventually has too many signals and not enough faders. The Fostex 2016 is the fix: a compact rack line mixer that quietly sums your stray synths, drum machines...

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...

Before every laptop shipped with a reverb plugin that sounded fine, Lexicon was building the boxes that defined what expensive sounded like. The LXP-15 is the half-rack sibling that snuck...

The S3000XL's clever sibling: the same beloved 16-bit Akai sampling engine with a CD-ROM drive built into the front, so you drop in a sample disc and load straight off...

Hand-built in England by Thermionic Culture, The Phoenix is a pure-valve stereo compressor beloved for the way it glues a mix together with warmth and weight rather than squashing it....

Behringer's CRAVE took one look at the price of a vintage mono synth and lopped off a couple of zeros. Under the hood: a proper analog 3340 oscillator, a creamy...

The top of Akai's classic S3000 line: 16-bit/44.1 sampling, that unmistakable Akai filter, and a build that simply keeps running. This one is fully wired on the back, eight individual...

Ensoniq's 1996 rack module and a 90s sleeper hit. The MR-Rack crams 64 voices, 886 sounds and Ensoniq's signature 2nd-generation Transwaves into a single 1U space, sample-based bread-and-butter (keys, strings,...

The S1100 took the industry-standard S1000 and added onboard effects, SCSI, and a hard-disk option, the sampler that defined pro 16-bit sound at the turn of the 90s. This one...