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...

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 TEAC AN-300 is the noise reduction companion to TEAC's 1970s multitrack system, and this one comes from the same set as our TEAC AX-300 mixers. Built to tame tape...

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...

Lexicon built their name on reverbs that cost more than your car, then put a huge slice of that magic into the MX400: a dual-stereo effects processor with proper Lexicon...

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...

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...

The VP-70 is one of those rare boxes that does something genuinely odd: it takes a voice in, tracks its pitch, and lets you process, harmonise and re-pitch it like...

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...

A lovely standalone TEAC record/playback amplifier from the reel-to-reel golden age: the electronics half of a classic tape setup, with a big glowing VU meter, monitor switching, tape-speed EQ and...

Before everyone could afford a rack of delays, the SDE-1000 was how you got real Roland digital echo without remortgaging the studio. It has that smooth, musical Roland repeat that...

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....

Tascam took Antares Auto-Tune, the technology that quietly rewired pop music, and bolted it onto a proper channel strip. The TA-1VP is a full vocal chain in a single rack...

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...

In 1976 David Blackmer built the first solid-state VCA compressor and changed recording forever. The 160 is brutally simple, three knobs and a big switchable VU, but it does one...

A clever and increasingly collectable bit of 80s Akai kit: the MB76 is a MIDI-programmable patch bay and mixer with 7 inputs and 6 outputs, letting you route any input...

The Focusrite Liquid Channel is what happens when a British console legend decides to bottle every classic preamp and compressor ever made and pour them into one 2U box. Using...

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...

In 1974 Sony looked at the Nagra, the Swiss reporter's recorder that cost as much as a small car, and built its own for half the money. The TC-510-2 is...

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...

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...

Everyone knows Sansui for the silver-faced receivers. Almost nobody knows they spent the early sixties building tube gear, and the MX-10 is the good one: a six-input valve mixing preamp...

The TEAC Model 3 is the compact analog console from Tascam's golden era, back when home studios were beige, knobs were plentiful, and everything sounded a little warmer than it...

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...