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...

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 Endless Analog CLASP system bridges analog tape and the modern DAW: record through a real tape machine with zero monitoring latency, capturing genuine tape compression and warmth while keeping...

The TEAC Model 3 is the compact analog console from Tascam's golden era, back when home studios were beige, knobs were plentiful, and everything sounded a little warmer than it...

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 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...

There is no overstating this one. The TR-808 is the most influential drum machine ever made: the booming kick, the ticking hats, the cowbell, the snap, the sound of hip-hop,...

The DRV-3000 is Korg's dual digital effects processor from the back end of the 80s, and it carries that slightly gritty, characterful early-digital voice that producers now chase on purpose....

Yamaha's clever 1979 take on the preset mono. One section gives you 29 instant presets for grab-and-go sounds, the other is a fully tweakable manual synth with a single VCO,...

Here is a slice of 1970s hi-fi ambition you rarely see: a discrete four-channel integrated amplifier from JVC's Victor line, complete with a built-in quadraphonic decoder and circuitry to handle...

The CA-1000 II is peak 1970s Yamaha: a Natural Sound integrated amplifier from the golden era of Japanese hi-fi, and the amp half the industry spent the next decade imitating....

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...

When you need to track a whole band at once without remortgaging, the Tascam US-1641 is the quiet hero: sixteen inputs in, four out, eight mic preamps with phantom, all...

The Mutronics Mutator is the rare and revered rackmount analog filter: two channels of fat, resonant filtering with envelope followers, LFOs and ring modulation, from subtle movement to full-on mangling.Used...

The Roland Juno-106 is the definitive affordable analog polysynth: six voices, that gorgeous DCO-plus-chorus sound, a slider for everything and full MIDI. The pads, basses and stabs on half the...

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...

The M5000 was TC's flagship Digital Audio Mainframe, a modular, software-upgradable processing platform that became a studio benchmark for reverb in the 90s and never really left. Engineers still rank...

The Studio Electronics SE-1 is what happens when boutique builders take the Minimoog blueprint and crank it to eleven. A pure analog monosynth with three discrete oscillators, a fat multi-mode...

Hand-built in England by Thermionic Culture, The Phoenix is a pure-valve stereo compressor beloved for the way it glues a mix together with warmth and weight rather than squashing it....

The Ensoniq SD-1 is the workstation that perfected the VFX-SD formula: gorgeous transwave synthesis, a built-in sequencer and that unmistakable lush, slightly dreamy Ensoniq character beloved by 90s producers and...

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...

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...

The Oberheim Matrix-6R is the rackmount heart of one of the 1980s great analog polysynths, and this one comes paired with the Access Matrix Programmer, the dedicated hardware controller that...

The Xpander is, quite simply, one of the most revered analog synthesizers ever built: a six-voice, keyboardless powerhouse that is essentially half a Matrix-12. Each of its six voices is...