The Sound Technology 1500A is proper pro-audio test gear, built to measure and align tape machines back when tape was king. Wow and flutter, speed, distortion, frequency response, it does...

This is the holy grail of Sherman gear. The Quad Modular Filter takes the cult Filterbank, the snarling, screaming, envelope-following distortion filter that producers worship, and stacks four of them...

The Yamaha EM-90A is what happens when an organ, a rhythm box and a 70s lounge act throw a cocktail party and accidentally record the whole thing to 8-track. It...

FATSO stands for Full Analog Tape Simulator and Optimizer, which is a lot of acronym for a box whose actual job is making digital recordings sound like they went through...

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 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...

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...

The MPC60 is where the modern MPC story begins. Designed by Roger Linn, it married 12-bit sampling with the swing and feel that defined boom-bap and built half of hip-hop...

Everyone knows Sansui for the silver-faced receivers. Almost nobody knows they spent the early sixties building tube gear, and the MX-10 is the good one: a six-input valve mixing preamp...

Yamaha's only real assault on the late-80s sampler wars, the TX16W is a 12-bit rack sampler with a character all its own: grainy, punchy, and (whisper it) arguably more pleasant...

The QuadraVerb Plus runs four effects at once, reverb, delay, pitch and EQ, in glorious 20kHz bandwidth, the upgraded version of the multi-effects box that lived in every 90s rack....

The Roland V-Synth XT puts the full V-Synth engine in a 2U rack: elastic audio, COSM modelling, sampling and deep real-time control, driving sounds you simply cannot get anywhere else.A...

Tascam took Antares Auto-Tune, the technology that quietly rewired pop music, and bolted it onto a proper channel strip. The TA-1VP is a full vocal chain in a single rack...

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 S3000XL's clever sibling: the same beloved 16-bit Akai sampling engine with a CD-ROM drive built into the front, so you drop in a sample disc and load straight off...

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 E-MU Proteus 2500 is a powerhouse rack sound module and command station: over a thousand ready-to-go sounds, a deep synthesis engine, real-time knobs and an onboard 16-track sequencer. From...

The Planet Phatt is E-MU's love letter to hip-hop, trip-hop and old-school R&B. Built on the same respected sound engine as the Proteus range, it is loaded with fat analog-style...

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 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...

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 Roland SH-2 is a cult 1979 monosynth and a genuine bass monster: two fat VCOs (with sub-oscillators) feeding that creamy Roland filter, a flexible envelope and LFO, and the...

In 2011, Teenage Engineering looked at the bloated, menu-diving world of digital workstations and built the exact opposite: a slab of aluminium the size of a TV remote that somehow...

Akai's answer to the Juno. The AX60 is a six-voice analog polysynth from 1986, built around the same Curtis CEM3394 voice chip you will find in a clutch of classic...