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...

Behringer's CRAVE took one look at the price of a vintage mono synth and lopped off a couple of zeros. Under the hood: a proper analog 3340 oscillator, a creamy...

The original Electronic Dream Plant WASP was a cult British synth famous for its filthy, buzzing oscillators and a filter that could sting. Behringer's WASP Deluxe is a faithful, fully...

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...

Vintage tape at its most beautiful. The Akai M-7 is an early-to-mid 1960s tube reel-to-reel, a four-track, four-speed semi-professional deck with separate valve amplifiers for each channel, twin glowing VU...

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,...

In 1972, the ARP Odyssey was the duophonic answer to the Minimoog: punkier, weirder, and bristling with sliders where Moog had knobs. Decades later, Korg teamed up with original designer...

The PEQ6 is Akai's MIDI-controllable programmable equalizer from the late 80s, designed to sit alongside the S900/S950 samplers and the rest of the Akai rack. Six bands of EQ with...

The Monster 2 is exactly what it sounds like: a boutique Polish dual-channel beast that bolts a fast FET compressor to a NOS-tube saturation stage and a parallel mix knob,...

The Matrix-1000 is a secret weapon: the full six-voice analog engine of the Oberheim Matrix-6 squeezed into a single rack unit, with 1000 factory patches on tap. Two DCOs per...

Before everyone had a thousand soft-samplers in a laptop, you had a rack, a floppy disk, and twelve glorious bits. The Akai S950 is the box that chopped the breaks...

The top of Akai's classic S3000 line: 16-bit/44.1 sampling, that unmistakable Akai filter, and a build that simply keeps running. This one is fully wired on the back, eight individual...

The ambient pedal everyone fell in love with. The Hologram Microcosm chops your signal into granular fragments and rebuilds it into shimmering loops, glacial pads, hypnotic drones and glitchy, tempo-locked...

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 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 Hohner Pianet T is the warm, slightly reedy electric piano that gave the Zombies, the Beatles and countless soul records their signature shimmer. Lightweight, characterful and instantly recognisable, it...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Released when most synth makers were still scared of giving you too much power, the Arturia Origin was an ambitious, misunderstood beast. Imagine stuffing a Moog Modular, ARP 2600, Jupiter-8...

The PolyBrute is Arturia's six-voice analog flagship and one of the most expressive synths of the modern era. Two Brute oscillators per voice run into dual analog filters (the steely...

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...

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...