The Yamaha R1000 is one of the first affordable digital reverbs, and it has a sound all its own: a handful of reverb modes, simple knobs, and an early-digital character...

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...

Maxon spent the 1980s quietly building the circuits inside the Ibanez pedals everyone worships, then bolted their own name onto this 1U rack delay. The DMD2000 is the result: a...

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...

The MU-R201 is Sony's twin-engine answer to the pro reverb market: two independent reverb processors in one box, so you can run two spaces at once or chain them for...

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,...

Sony built consumer hi-fi that obsessed over clean signal paths, then turned the same obsession loose on a studio reverb. The DPS-R7 is a tidy 1U digital reverb from the...

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 S1100 took the industry-standard S1000 and added onboard effects, SCSI, and a hard-disk option, the sampler that defined pro 16-bit sound at the turn of the 90s. This one...

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...

JVC's SEA (Sound Effect Amplifier) series were the EQs to have in the 70s, and the SEA-7070 is a hefty, silver-faced stereo graphic equaliser with banks of sliders for sculpting...

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,...

The Roland GAIA SH-01 is the synth that refuses to hide anything from you. Every function gets its own knob or button, three full virtual-analog tone engines stack into one...

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...

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 AKG BX20E is the king of spring reverbs: a torsional transmission-line spring system in its own substantial cabinet, giving long, lush, three-dimensional decays that sit somewhere between a plate...

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...

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,...

Roland built the Integra-7 as the ultimate SuperNATURAL sound source: a rack-mount brain stacked with thousands of studio-grade acoustic, band and synth tones, drawn from Roland's flagship workstation lineage. Sixteen...

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...

Steinberg and Yamaha's UR28M is a do-it-all desktop audio interface that quietly punches above its weight: pristine D-PRE mic preamps, rock-solid drivers, and, crucially, a proper hardware monitor controller with...

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...

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...

If one synth defines the lush, shimmering pads of the 1980s, it is the Juno-60. Six voices of digitally-controlled analog oscillators, a gorgeous 24dB resonant low-pass filter sharing the same...