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...

Yamaha's clever 1979 take on the preset mono. One section gives you 29 instant presets for grab-and-go sounds, the other is a fully tweakable manual synth with a single VCO,...

Korg's 1981 game-changer: real six-voice analog polyphony at roughly a third the price of a Prophet-5 or OB-X, which is exactly why it ended up under so many 80s hands....

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 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...

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...

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...

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 Maschine MK3 is Native Instruments' flagship groove production system: 16 velocity-sensitive pads, two crisp colour screens, a big browse-and-tweak encoder and deep integration with a massive sound library. Finger-drum,...

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 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...

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...

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...

FATSO stands for Full Analog Tape Simulator and Optimizer, which is a lot of acronym for a box whose actual job is making digital recordings sound like they went through...

When the S1000 landed in 1988, it did to the studio what the S900 had only hinted at: proper 16-bit, 44.1kHz stereo sampling that instantly became the professional benchmark. For...

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...

Some studio boxes are famous; the Dimension D is famous for being invisible. Roland's SDD-320 does not warble or swirl like an ordinary chorus; it uses two synced bucket-brigade delay...

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 Moog Prodigy is the scrappy kid who wore only black and could outplay anyone in a riff battle. Released in 1979 as Moog's answer to rising competition, it was...

The Prophet 12 was Dave Smith's triumphant 2013 return to the Prophet line, and the first to break from pure analog. Twelve voices of hybrid synthesis: four digital oscillators per...

Roland's SRV-2000 is a 1U slice of mid-80s digital reverb that has aged into a proper character box. It pairs early digital reverb algorithms with a built-in 3-band parametric EQ,...

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...

The MU-E041 is Sony's vintage parametric equalizer, giving you sweepable frequency and bandwidth control rather than fixed graphic bands. That means precise tone shaping for a hi-fi system or a...

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...