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 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 Sony VT-M5 is the kind of gadget you would expect in a Cold War surveillance van or on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Billed as an Audioscope...

The legendary dbx Boom Box: an all-analog subharmonic synthesizer that doesn't just boost your bass, it manufactures it. Feed it a signal and it tracks the bass already there, synthesizes...

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...

The MOTU 1296 adds twelve channels of high-quality 96kHz, 24-bit analog input and output to MOTU's PCI-424 core system. Clean converters, balanced TRS throughout and rock-solid performance.A useful I/O expander...

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...

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...

When Korg's ex-Sequential Circuits design team finally emerged from their lab in 1995, they brought the Prophecy: a monophonic solo synth that crammed analog modeling, FM-style VPM and physical modeling...

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...

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...

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...

The Korg Z1 is a 90s marvel: a multi-oscillator physical-modeling synth running Korg's MOSS engine, capable of breathy reeds, plucked strings, screaming leads and analog-style basses, all with deep, expressive...

Knobs that move themselves. The Melbourne Instruments DELIA is a six-voice, bi-timbral hybrid polysynth built around the company's jaw-dropping motorized Rotary Recall knobs: load a patch and every control physically...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Tune your system by eye and ear. The Yamaha EQ-630 is a Natural Sound stereo graphic equalizer from 1989, and a properly sophisticated one: ten bands per channel with fully...

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...

The Victor/JVC SEA-80 is one of the prettiest pieces of vintage hi-fi you can put in a rack: a 10-band-per-channel stereo graphic equalizer from 1979 with a built-in, glowing fluorescent...