Cheap when it launched, legendary ever since. The Roland SH-101 was the synth "for the rest of us", a 32-key monosynth in red, grey or blue that you could sling...

A heavyweight from the golden era of Japanese hi-fi. The Yamaha B-4 is a Natural Sound stereo power amplifier from 1978, built as two symmetrical mono amplifiers in one 21kg...

The Yamaha MV802 is a compact rackmount line mixer, perfect for folding extra synths, modules or effects returns into your setup without burning channels on the big desk. Simple, clean...

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...

If you could own one stereo bus compressor for the rest of your life, a frightening number of top engineers would name the Neve 33609. Derived from the legendary 2254...

The Fieldtone Box of Uncertainty is exactly what it sounds like: a beautiful, hand-built boutique sound box that turns audio into shimmering, fragmented, unpredictable granular textures. With controls like particle...

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...

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 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 Yamaha MG124C is the workhorse 12-channel analog mixer that turns up everywhere for good reason: clean Yamaha mic preamps, musical 3-band EQ, built-in compression on the mono channels and...

When Access dropped the Virus C in 2002, it didn't so much join the synth world as colonise it. This is the desktop module that turned up on countless trance...

Korg's Volca Keys proves you don't need a mortgage to own a real analog synth. Three genuine analog voices, a squelchy resonant filter, and a delay that smears everything into...

Clavia's Nord Drum 2 is what happens when Swedish synth wizards aim their talents at percussion. No samples, no presets pretending to be a kit, just six channels of pure...

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 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...

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...

Studer built the tape machines that defined recording, then turned the same Swiss obsession to mixing. The 169 landed in 1978 as a compact broadcast desk for European radio and...

In 1972, the ARP Odyssey was the duophonic answer to the Minimoog: punkier, weirder, and bristling with sliders where Moog had knobs. Decades later, Korg teamed up with original designer...

Millennia's Origin is what happens when a boutique builder refuses to compromise. One 2U chassis hides two complete signal paths, one all-tube, one all-discrete solid state, switchable at the touch...

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....

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 Sony VT-M5 is the kind of gadget you would expect in a Cold War surveillance van or on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Billed as an Audioscope...

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...

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...