In the early 1980s Oberheim took aim at the Linn LM-1 and built a drum machine that quietly ended up on more classic records than almost anything else of its...

If you could own one stereo bus compressor for the rest of your life, a frightening number of top engineers would name the Neve 33609. Derived from the legendary 2254...

Out of Austin, Texas came a graphic EQ that quietly became the studio standard while flashier rivals grabbed the magazine covers. The White Instruments 4400 skips the fragile faders and...

Before Dave Smith gave the world MIDI itself, Sequential's first drum machine landed in 1984 with a sound all its own. The DrumTraks packs thirteen crunchy 8-bit sampled voices (bass,...

The Sony SRA-3 is the all-valve recording amplifier that quietly became one of the most hunted secret weapons in modern psych. Built in the 1960s to ride alongside Sony's reel-to-reel...

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...

Every studio eventually has too many signals and not enough faders. The Fostex 2016 is the fix: a compact rack line mixer that quietly sums your stray synths, drum machines...

Pro monitoring control for your desktop, and a project-studio staple. The PreSonus Monitor Station V2 lets you switch instantly between up to four stereo sources and three sets of monitor...

When Access dropped the Virus C in 2002, it didn't so much join the synth world as colonise it. This is the desktop module that turned up on countless trance...

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...

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,...

If a record sounds good on NS-10s, it sounds good everywhere, which is why these white-coned Yamahas ended up on the meter bridge of nearly every serious studio on earth....

Roland's 12-bit rack sampler from the late 80s. The S-330 packs the same characterful converters as its keyboard siblings into a tidy 1U box, complete with that gritty, slightly lo-fi...

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...

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 VP-70 is one of those rare boxes that does something genuinely odd: it takes a voice in, tracks its pitch, and lets you process, harmonise and re-pitch it like...

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...

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 Universal Audio Apollo Twin is the desktop interface that put genuine UAD plug-in processing on every studio desk: gorgeous Unison preamps, pristine AD/DA conversion and the ability to track...

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 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...

When a studio needed a workhorse that sounded like a Studer but didn't cost like one, it bought a Revox PR-99. Built in Switzerland on the bones of the legendary...

In 1976 David Blackmer built the first solid-state VCA compressor and changed recording forever. The 160 is brutally simple, three knobs and a big switchable VU, but it does one...

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...