Before the SPX90 ruled the world, Yamaha's REV7 was the studio's go-to digital reverb: the rackmount sibling of the legendary SPX, with lush, glassy halls and plates that defined the...

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...

Before everyone could afford a rack of delays, the SDE-1000 was how you got real Roland digital echo without remortgaging the studio. It has that smooth, musical Roland repeat that...

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...

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...

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 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 CompuRhythm CR-5000 is Roland's 1981 preset-and-programmable rhythm machine, and it sits right in the family tree between the legendary CR-78 and the TR-808. That means proper vintage Roland analog...

Roland's first stab at semi-modular synthesis, from 1975, and quietly one of the best-sounding things the company ever built. This is a three-module rig: the 101 keyboard synth at the...

The Novation Supernova is the analog-modelling rack synth that put Novation on the map: three oscillators and a proper resonant filter per voice, run through seven simultaneous effects, for a...

Roland built the Integra-7 as the ultimate SuperNATURAL sound source: a rack-mount brain stacked with thousands of studio-grade acoustic, band and synth tones, drawn from Roland's flagship workstation lineage. Sixteen...

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...

A lovely standalone TEAC record/playback amplifier from the reel-to-reel golden age: the electronics half of a classic tape setup, with a big glowing VU meter, monitor switching, tape-speed EQ and...

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 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...

The TEAC/Tascam M-30 is a proper early-80s all-analog 8-channel console, the kind of warm, characterful little mixer people buy precisely to take the cold edge off digital recordings. It was...

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...

Maxon spent the 1980s quietly building the circuits inside the Ibanez pedals everyone worships, then bolted their own name onto this 1U rack delay. The DMD2000 is the result: a...

The Behringer Ultra-Curve Pro (DSP8024) is the swiss-army processor that has lived in countless racks: a 31-band digital graphic EQ, real-time analyzer, feedback destroyer, dynamics and more, all with a...

Lexicon built their name on reverbs that cost more than your car, then put a huge slice of that magic into the MX400: a dual-stereo effects processor with proper Lexicon...

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 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 1604-VLZ Pro is the mixer that earned Mackie its reputation: sixteen channels of clean, high-headroom analog with the famous XDR mic preamps, flexible four-bus routing, musical 3-band EQ and...

The bigger brother of the S-330 and Roland's flagship rack sampler of the era: more voices, more memory, more outputs, and the same lovably gritty 12-bit Roland conversion. With a...