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...

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...

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...

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...

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 Watkins (WEM) Copicat is the original British tape echo: warm, characterful slapback and repeats from real moving tape, beloved since the late 50s by everyone from rockabilly guitarists to...

The Mutronics Mutator is the rare and revered rackmount analog filter: two channels of fat, resonant filtering with envelope followers, LFOs and ring modulation, from subtle movement to full-on mangling.Used...

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 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...

Before Eventide made pitch-shifting respectable and digital FX racks took over studios, MXR quietly unleashed the 129 Pitch Transposer: a gritty, unpredictable, slightly drunk box of pitch-warping chaos. It was...

The Maxon AD-150 is a rackmount bucket-brigade analog delay from the company behind Ibanez's classic effects. Warm, dark repeats, gentle modulation and that organic BBD smear digital cannot fake.A lovely,...

The Yamaha CA-X1 is a gorgeous slice of late-70s silver-faced hi-fi: a natural-sound integrated amplifier with twin output-level VU meters, a satisfying heavy volume wheel, and that clean, slightly warm...

Roland only sold the RDE-1800 in Japan, which is the main reason so few of these ever left the country. It pairs a digital delay with a real spring reverb...

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...

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...

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...