Ask a roomful of engineers to name one compressor they cannot live without and a scary number will say the Distressor. Since 1995, Dave Derr's EL8 has been the go-to...

There is no overstating this one. The TR-808 is the most influential drum machine ever made: the booming kick, the ticking hats, the cowbell, the snap, the sound of hip-hop,...

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...

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...

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...

The MOTU 1296 adds twelve channels of high-quality 96kHz, 24-bit analog input and output to MOTU's PCI-424 core system. Clean converters, balanced TRS throughout and rock-solid performance.A useful I/O expander...

Before digital reverb took over, the MICMIX Master Room was the spring reverb serious studios reached for: a big, lush, three-dimensional spring sound far richer than the tanks built into...

The Sherman Filterbank is the cult Belgian effect that producers reach for when they want something to sound dangerous. Run drums, synths, vocals, anything through its screaming, self-oscillating multimode filters...

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...

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 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...

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 Sony VT-M5 is the kind of gadget you would expect in a Cold War surveillance van or on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Billed as an Audioscope...

The M5000 was TC's flagship Digital Audio Mainframe, a modular, software-upgradable processing platform that became a studio benchmark for reverb in the 90s and never really left. Engineers still rank...

The Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo is the final, fullest evolution of the Space Echo line, and if you only ever own one tape echo, the faithful agree this is the...

The Focusrite Liquid Channel is what happens when a British console legend decides to bottle every classic preamp and compressor ever made and pour them into one 2U box. Using...

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 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...