The Marantz 2130 is one of the most beautiful tuners ever made: a quartz-locked FM/AM stereo tuner with Marantz's mesmerising oscilloscope display showing signal strength, multipath and tuning, all wrapped...

The Auratone 5C is the legendary little mixcube that engineers from Motown onward used to check that a mix translates: full-range, single-driver, brutally honest. If it sounds good on an...

The Quad 303 is a slice of British hi-fi history: a beautifully engineered power amplifier from the late 1960s and 70s, famous for its smooth, musical sound and near-bulletproof reliability....

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...

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...

Incredible condition and with remove control- one of the true holy grails of vintage digital. The Publison Infernal Machine 90 is an exceptionally rare French multi-effects processor and sampler from...

The Behringer Composer Pro is the workhorse dynamics box that's lived in budget racks forever, and for good reason: two channels of compressor, peak limiter, expander and gate with the...

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...

Pro monitoring control for your desktop, and a project-studio staple. The PreSonus Monitor Station V2 lets you switch instantly between up to four stereo sources and three sets of monitor...

The Mutronics Mutator is the rare and revered rackmount analog filter: two channels of fat, resonant filtering with envelope followers, LFOs and ring modulation, from subtle movement to full-on mangling.Used...

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...

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...

When a studio needed a workhorse that sounded like a Studer but didn't cost like one, it bought a Revox PR-99. Built in Switzerland on the bones of the legendary...

Yamaha's only real assault on the late-80s sampler wars, the TX16W is a 12-bit rack sampler with a character all its own: grainy, punchy, and (whisper it) arguably more pleasant...

The Ensoniq DP/4+ is really four effects processors in a single rack, units A, B, C and D, each a complete 24-bit stereo multi-FX in its own right, with four...

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...

The PolyBrute is Arturia's six-voice analog flagship and one of the most expressive synths of the modern era. Two Brute oscillators per voice run into dual analog filters (the steely...

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...

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...

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...