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 Behringer Composer Pro is the workhorse dynamics box that's lived in budget racks forever, and for good reason: two channels of compressor, peak limiter, expander and gate with the...

The rackmount Tube Driver, and the one to have. This is the TDR-101 from the era when B.K. Butler and Chandler built them in partnership, widely held to be the...

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...

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...

A tidy slice of Sony hi-fi history, the MU-E151 is a graphic equalizer built to fine-tune a home system. Per-channel sliders let you carve the response to taste, and it...

Victor (JVC's home-market brand) made some of the prettiest hi-fi gear of the era, and the SEA-60 is exhibit A: a stereo graphic equaliser with a mesmerising blue spectrum-analyser display...

Before everyone had a thousand soft-samplers in a laptop, you had a rack, a floppy disk, and twelve glorious bits. The Akai S950 is the box that chopped the breaks...

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 Yamaha Q1131 is a professional 1/3-octave graphic equaliser: thirty-one bands of precise tone control for tuning rooms, taming feedback, or carving a signal exactly how you want it. Built...

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 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 LA-2A is the most famous compressor in the world, and for good reason. This is Universal Audio's faithful reissue of the early-60s Teletronix classic, point-to-point hand-wired in California, using...

The Yamaha B-70 brings the muscle: a natural-sound stereo power amplifier in that handsome black-and-red 80s livery, with glowing level meters and plenty of clean current to drive serious speakers....

The Yamaha CA-X1 is a gorgeous slice of late-70s silver-faced hi-fi: a natural-sound integrated amplifier with twin output-level VU meters, a satisfying heavy volume wheel, and that clean, slightly warm...

The Yamaha M-80 is a serious natural-sound stereo power amplifier: plenty of clean watts, a striking black fascia with glowing level meters, and that composed, effortless Yamaha delivery. Built to...

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...

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...

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...

A heavyweight from the golden era of Japanese hi-fi. The Yamaha B-4 is a Natural Sound stereo power amplifier from 1978, built as two symmetrical mono amplifiers in one 21kg...

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...

Orban built its name on broadcast and studio processing, and the 672A is a workhorse parametric EQ that does precise, musical tone-shaping the cheap stuff cannot touch. Each unit gives...

Don't let the modest price fool you, the 18Xs MkII is a seriously good single-channel front end. A transformer-coupled, Class-A microphone preamp with up to 65dB of gain, a high-impedance...