History lives in this one. In early 1983 the Prophet-600 became the first synthesizer on earth to ship with MIDI, the protocol Dave Smith gave the world for free, and...

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...

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...

The Studio Electronics SE-1 is what happens when boutique builders take the Minimoog blueprint and crank it to eleven. A pure analog monosynth with three discrete oscillators, a fat multi-mode...

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 OSCar, built by the Oxford Synthesiser Company, is one of the most distinctive monosynths ever made: two oscillators with additive waveform shaping, a powerful multimode filter, an onboard sequencer...

Ensoniq's 1996 rack module and a 90s sleeper hit. The MR-Rack crams 64 voices, 886 sounds and Ensoniq's signature 2nd-generation Transwaves into a single 1U space, sample-based bread-and-butter (keys, strings,...

The Jugg Box DPM-48 is an obscure slice of Italian rhythm history: a digital drum machine with a big blue knob, a wall of buttons and a lo-fi character all...

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 Xtreme Lead-1 (XL-1) is E-MU's dance-music powerhouse, built on the Proteus-2000 platform and stuffed with trance leads, techno stabs, hard basses, arps and kits aimed squarely at the dancefloor....

The Polivoks is the legendary Soviet duophonic analog synth, built in the USSR and beloved for its aggressive, slightly unhinged character. That famous resonant filter snarls and screams like nothing...