Waldorf built the Q for people who wanted German engineering with an attitude problem. This is a virtual-analog synth that hits like a hardware monster: fat, precise oscillators, that famously...

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...

One of the very few synthesizers ever built on true additive synthesis, and Kawai's top-of-the-line workstation when it landed in 1996. Instead of starting from samples, the K5000W builds every...

In 2011, Teenage Engineering looked at the bloated, menu-diving world of digital workstations and built the exact opposite: a slab of aluminium the size of a TV remote that somehow...

The Roland TR-707 is the 707: a clean, punchy digital rhythm composer with that unmistakable 80s click and snap, the classic step-sequencer grid, and a sound that built house, techno...

Yamaha's D1500 is the kind of dependable digital delay that quietly did the work on a thousand 80s records. Clean repeats, a genuinely useful modulation section for chorus and flange,...

The Jupiter-Xm is Roland's love letter to its own history, shrunk into a portable, battery-powered box with built-in speakers. Its ZEN-Core engine runs authentic Model Bank recreations of the Jupiter-8,...

When Korg's ex-Sequential Circuits design team finally emerged from their lab in 1995, they brought the Prophecy: a monophonic solo synth that crammed analog modeling, FM-style VPM and physical modeling...

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...

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...

The bigger brother of the S-330 and Roland's flagship rack sampler of the era: more voices, more memory, more outputs, and the same lovably gritty 12-bit Roland conversion. With a...

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...

The Novation Supernova is the analog-modelling rack synth that put Novation on the map: three oscillators and a proper resonant filter per voice, run through seven simultaneous effects, for a...

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...

The Yamaha EM-90A is what happens when an organ, a rhythm box and a 70s lounge act throw a cocktail party and accidentally record the whole thing to 8-track. It...

Released in the early 1970s, the TEAC AX-300 is a 6:4 analog mixer built for the golden age of home multitrack. Conceived as the mixing companion to TEAC's legendary 4-channel...

The Roland JSQ-60 is a slice of early-80s sequencing history: a digital keyboard recorder that captures your performances and plays them back to compatible Roland synths via DCB and MIDI....

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...

A tidy slice of Sony hi-fi history, the MU-E151 is a graphic equalizer built to fine-tune a home system. Per-channel sliders let you carve the response to taste, and it...

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...

When the synth collection outgrows the desk, the MM-200 is the answer: sixteen channels of line mixing with EQ, effect sends and stereo returns, all in a tidy rack. Built...

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 CS6R packs the entire engine of Yamaha's CS6x performance synth into a 1U rack: lush AWM2 sample-based sounds, a full FM synthesis system, multitimbral parts, and a bank of...

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...