The Victor/JVC SEA-80 is one of the prettiest pieces of vintage hi-fi you can put in a rack: a 10-band-per-channel stereo graphic equalizer from 1979 with a built-in, glowing fluorescent...

The Quad 34 is the elegant preamplifier at the heart of Quad's celebrated 1980s system. Compact, beautifully made and famously musical, it offers disc, radio and tape inputs, tilt and...

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...

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...

A genuinely rare piece of British studio history. The Chilton M10/2 Mk6 was the final and most refined version of Chilton's celebrated Quiet Mixer series, a 10-input, 2-output portable console...

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 Watkins (WEM) Copicat is the original British tape echo: warm, characterful slapback and repeats from real moving tape, beloved since the late 50s by everyone from rockabilly guitarists to...

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...

The StudioComm is a purpose-built monitor controller from Studio Technologies: clean, transparent level control, source and speaker switching and talkback, all in a tidy desktop console. The unglamorous-but-essential brain that...

Orban built its name on broadcast and studio processing, and the 672A is a workhorse parametric EQ that does precise, musical tone-shaping the cheap stuff cannot touch. Each unit gives...

This is the holy grail of Sherman gear. The Quad Modular Filter takes the cult Filterbank, the snarling, screaming, envelope-following distortion filter that producers worship, and stacks four of them...

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...

A complete hardware mixing desk for your DAW, in two pieces. The Softube Console 1 brings the legendary Solid State Logic 4000 E channel strip to your fingertips: four-band EQ,...

Before Eventide made pitch-shifting respectable and digital FX racks took over studios, MXR quietly unleashed the 129 Pitch Transposer: a gritty, unpredictable, slightly drunk box of pitch-warping chaos. It was...

The legendary dbx Boom Box: an all-analog subharmonic synthesizer that doesn't just boost your bass, it manufactures it. Feed it a signal and it tracks the bass already there, synthesizes...

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 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...

Out of Austin, Texas came a graphic EQ that quietly became the studio standard while flashier rivals grabbed the magazine covers. The White Instruments 4400 skips the fragile faders and...

Long before the 808 shook subwoofers, the CR-78 was keeping time in a handsome wood-veneer box built to back a home-organ player. Then everyone else got hold of it. That's...

The rackmount Tube Driver, and the one to have. This is the TDR-101 from the era when B.K. Butler and Chandler built them in partnership, widely held to be the...

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 Planet Phatt is E-MU's love letter to hip-hop, trip-hop and old-school R&B. Built on the same respected sound engine as the Proteus range, it is loaded with fat analog-style...

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...

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,...