The ambient pedal everyone fell in love with. The Hologram Microcosm chops your signal into granular fragments and rebuilds it into shimmering loops, glacial pads, hypnotic drones and glitchy, tempo-locked...

The Waldorf Blofeld packs the German company's legendary wavetable synthesis (plus virtual analog and FM) into a tiny, gorgeous desktop box. Rich pads, snarling basses, glassy bells and evolving textures...

Here is a properly special rig. The Akai AX60 is a fat six-voice analog polysynth built around the legendary Curtis CEM 3394 chip, with sliders, a real resonant filter, an...

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...

In the early 1980s Oberheim took aim at the Linn LM-1 and built a drum machine that quietly ended up on more classic records than almost anything else of its...

The Akai EWI 3020 is a proper electronic wind instrument: blow, bite and finger it like a sax or clarinet and it translates every nuance of your breath into expressive...

The Xpander is, quite simply, one of the most revered analog synthesizers ever built: a six-voice, keyboardless powerhouse that is essentially half a Matrix-12. Each of its six voices is...

A gorgeous slab of mid-century Japanese test equipment, the Leader LSG-11 is an RF signal generator with a big sweeping dial, chunky bakelite knobs and that unmistakable grey-hammer finish. Whether...

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...

A step sequencer that feels like an instrument. Eight tracks, 32 steps, 256 patterns, all wrapped in a gorgeous oak-and-aluminium body with a big illuminated button grid you actually want...

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 E-MU Proteus 2500 is a powerhouse rack sound module and command station: over a thousand ready-to-go sounds, a deep synthesis engine, real-time knobs and an onboard 16-track sequencer. From...

The Xtreme Lead-1 (XL-1) is E-MU's dance-music powerhouse, built on the Proteus-2000 platform and stuffed with trance leads, techno stabs, hard basses, arps and kits aimed squarely at the dancefloor....