The Source is the most unusual Moog ever built: a 1981 monosynth controlled by a Z80 microprocessor, with no knobs or sliders at all, just a sleek flat membrane panel...

Before Dave Smith gave the world MIDI itself, Sequential's first drum machine landed in 1984 with a sound all its own. The DrumTraks packs thirteen crunchy 8-bit sampled voices (bass,...

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...

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...

The Polivoks is the legendary Soviet duophonic analog synth, built in the USSR and beloved for its aggressive, slightly unhinged character. That famous resonant filter snarls and screams like nothing...

The CA-2000 sits at the top of Yamaha's revered CA integrated line, the bigger, brawnier sibling of the CA-1000 and the amp Yamaha built by feeding its B-1/C-1 separate-amp know-how...

The Jugg Box DPM-48 is an obscure slice of Italian rhythm history: a digital drum machine with a big blue knob, a wall of buttons and a lo-fi character all...

The Marantz 2130 is one of the most beautiful tuners ever made: a quartz-locked FM/AM stereo tuner with Marantz's mesmerising oscilloscope display showing signal strength, multipath and tuning, all wrapped...

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...

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...

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...

When your MIDI rig sprouts more modules than your desk can handle, the Roland M-240R steps in: twenty-four channels of line mixing in a rack, with the clean, quiet Roland...

The EPS 16 Plus is Ensoniq's 1990 sampling workstation and a low-key legend of golden-era hip-hop. It samples at 16-bit with that warm, slightly gritty Ensoniq character, and its killer...

One of the very few synthesizers ever built on true additive synthesis, and Kawai's top-of-the-line workstation when it landed in 1996. Instead of starting from samples, the K5000W builds every...

When the synth collection outgrows the desk, the MM-200 is the answer: sixteen channels of line mixing with EQ, effect sends and stereo returns, all in a tidy rack. Built...

The Roland DDR-30 is a rackmount digital drum module from the mid-80s, designed to be hit: pair it with pads or triggers and it fires punchy PCM drum voices with...

The VP-70 is one of those rare boxes that does something genuinely odd: it takes a voice in, tracks its pitch, and lets you process, harmonise and re-pitch it like...

Built at the peak of the 1970s "receiver wars", the Sansui AU-11000 was the company's no-compromise flagship integrated, and it shows. 110 watts a side, dual fully-independent channels from power...

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...

Yamaha's D1500 is the kind of dependable digital delay that quietly did the work on a thousand 80s records. Clean repeats, a genuinely useful modulation section for chorus and flange,...

In the early 1980s Oberheim took aim at the Linn LM-1 and built a drum machine that quietly ended up on more classic records than almost anything else of its...

In 1976 David Blackmer built the first solid-state VCA compressor and changed recording forever. The 160 is brutally simple, three knobs and a big switchable VU, but it does one...

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...

Released in the early 1970s, the TEAC AX-300 is a 6:4 analog mixer built for the golden age of home multitrack. Conceived as the mixing companion to TEAC's legendary 4-channel...