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...

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 Oberheim Matrix-6R is the rackmount heart of one of the 1980s great analog polysynths, and this one comes paired with the Access Matrix Programmer, the dedicated hardware controller that...

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...

Akai's answer to the Juno. The AX60 is a six-voice analog polysynth from 1986, built around the same Curtis CEM3394 voice chip you will find in a clutch of classic...

Roger Linn's LinnDrum (often miscalled the LM-2) is the sound of an entire decade: the sampled-drum machine that put real kicks, snares and hats into pop, R&B and new wave...

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 Sound Technology 1500A is proper pro-audio test gear, built to measure and align tape machines back when tape was king. Wow and flutter, speed, distortion, frequency response, it does...

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 MPC4000 is the biggest, most powerful MPC Akai ever built, and the one the heavyweights reached for. Under the hood sits the 24-bit/96kHz Z96 sampling engine borrowed from Akai's...

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 TEAC AN-300 is the noise reduction companion to TEAC's 1970s multitrack system, and this one comes from the same set as our TEAC AX-300 mixers. Built to tame tape...

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...

The Maxon AD-150 is a rackmount bucket-brigade analog delay from the company behind Ibanez's classic effects. Warm, dark repeats, gentle modulation and that organic BBD smear digital cannot fake.A lovely,...

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 Yamaha R1000 is one of the first affordable digital reverbs, and it has a sound all its own: a handful of reverb modes, simple knobs, and an early-digital character...

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...

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...

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...

In 1974 Sony looked at the Nagra, the Swiss reporter's recorder that cost as much as a small car, and built its own for half the money. The TC-510-2 is...

The Roland V-Synth XT puts the full V-Synth engine in a 2U rack: elastic audio, COSM modelling, sampling and deep real-time control, driving sounds you simply cannot get anywhere else.A...

The Yamaha Q1131 is a professional 1/3-octave graphic equaliser: thirty-one bands of precise tone control for tuning rooms, taming feedback, or carving a signal exactly how you want it. Built...

The AKG BX20E is the king of spring reverbs: a torsional transmission-line spring system in its own substantial cabinet, giving long, lush, three-dimensional decays that sit somewhere between a plate...