The MU-E041 is Sony's vintage parametric equalizer, giving you sweepable frequency and bandwidth control rather than fixed graphic bands. That means precise tone shaping for a hi-fi system or a...

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....

The Roland MCR-8 is a tidy hands-on control surface: eight channel faders, assignable knobs, function buttons and full transport, all sending MIDI to your sequencer, DAW or modules. A simple,...

When the S1000 landed in 1988, it did to the studio what the S900 had only hinted at: proper 16-bit, 44.1kHz stereo sampling that instantly became the professional benchmark. For...

There is no overstating this one. The TR-808 is the most influential drum machine ever made: the booming kick, the ticking hats, the cowbell, the snap, the sound of hip-hop,...

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,...

Don't let the modest price fool you, the 18Xs MkII is a seriously good single-channel front end. A transformer-coupled, Class-A microphone preamp with up to 65dB of gain, a high-impedance...

The Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro (DSP8024) is the swiss-army processor that has lived in countless racks: a 31-band digital graphic EQ, real-time analyzer, feedback destroyer, dynamics and more, all with a...

Don't let the cartoon fat man fool you: the HHB Radius 3 is a genuine valve stereo compressor with a glowing VU and a brilliantly simple program-based front end. Pick...

The RZ-1 is Casio's 1986 oddball masterpiece: a 12-bit PCM drum machine with a built-in sampler, and one of the cheapest ways into that crunchy, grainy 80s sampling sound. You...

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...

The LA-2A is the most famous compressor in the world, and for good reason. This is Universal Audio's faithful reissue of the early-60s Teletronix classic, point-to-point hand-wired in California, using...

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...

Steinberg and Yamaha's UR28M is a do-it-all desktop audio interface that quietly punches above its weight: pristine D-PRE mic preamps, rock-solid drivers, and, crucially, a proper hardware monitor controller with...

Roger Linn's LinnDrum (often miscalled the LM-2) is the sound of an entire decade: the sampled-drum machine that put real kicks, snares and hats into pop, R&B and new wave...

This is the holy grail of Sherman gear. The Quad Modular Filter takes the cult Filterbank, the snarling, screaming, envelope-following distortion filter that producers worship, and stacks four of them...

The 1176 is the other most-famous compressor in the world (the FET one), and this is Universal Audio's hand-built reissue of the blackface 1176LN, true to Bill Putnam's D/E-rev design....

FATSO stands for Full Analog Tape Simulator and Optimizer, which is a lot of acronym for a box whose actual job is making digital recordings sound like they went through...

The MPC4000 is the biggest, most powerful MPC Akai ever built, and the one the heavyweights reached for. Under the hood sits the 24-bit/96kHz Z96 sampling engine borrowed from Akai's...

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 Ensoniq DP/4+ is really four effects processors in a single rack, units A, B, C and D, each a complete 24-bit stereo multi-FX in its own right, with four...

When you need to track a whole band at once without remortgaging, the Tascam US-1641 is the quiet hero: sixteen inputs in, four out, eight mic preamps with phantom, all...

Hand-built in California by Speck Electronics, the Model ASC is a boutique four-band parametric EQ with a cult following: clean, musical and surgical, yet never thin or harsh. This is...

The 160S is dbx founder David Blackmer's high-end reimagining of his own legendary 160 VCA compressor, hand-built in the boutique Blue Series. A true-stereo (or dual-mono) VCA compressor with that...