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...

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...

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...

Akai's late-90s reinvention of the sampler: a big graphical screen, a computer-style workflow, and that clean 16-bit Akai character. This particular unit is loaded to the gills, RAM maxed at...

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 Korg minilogue is the little analog polysynth that reignited the whole craze: four voices of genuine analog warmth, a brilliant oscilloscope display, a proper step sequencer and a hands-on...

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 the early 1980s Oberheim took aim at the Linn LM-1 and built a drum machine that quietly ended up on more classic records than almost anything else of its...

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...

The Quad FM4 completes the classic 80s Quad stack: a refined FM tuner with that smooth Quad sound and the matching grey-and-orange styling. Hook it up to a Quad 34...

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...

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...

Here is a properly special rig. The Akai AX60 is a fat six-voice analog polysynth built around the legendary Curtis CEM 3394 chip, with sliders, a real resonant filter, an...

The S3000XL's clever sibling: the same beloved 16-bit Akai sampling engine with a CD-ROM drive built into the front, so you drop in a sample disc and load straight off...

Clavia's original Nord Drum, the little red box that builds drum sounds from pure synthesis instead of samples. Four channels of resonant, subtractive percussion, each with click, noise and tone...

The MPC60 is where the modern MPC story begins. Designed by Roger Linn, it married 12-bit sampling with the swing and feel that defined boom-bap and built half of hip-hop...

Akai's first sampler, and the box that put affordable 12-bit sampling on the map. The S612 is a single-rack 12-bit sampler with that unmistakable gritty, lo-fi early-Akai character, real-time start/end...

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...

Do not let the 25 keys fool you. The Subsequent 25 packs the full-fat Moog ladder filter, three oscillators and a re-tuned multidrive circuit into Moog's most compact keyboard synth,...

The EPS 16 Plus is Ensoniq's 1990 sampling workstation and a low-key legend of golden-era hip-hop. It samples at 16-bit with that warm, slightly gritty Ensoniq character, and its killer...

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...

The Endless Analog CLASP system bridges analog tape and the modern DAW: record through a real tape machine with zero monitoring latency, capturing genuine tape compression and warmth while keeping...

The Ensoniq SD-1 is the workstation that perfected the VFX-SD formula: gorgeous transwave synthesis, a built-in sequencer and that unmistakable lush, slightly dreamy Ensoniq character beloved by 90s producers and...

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...