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...
Roger Linn's LinnDrum (often miscalled the LM-2) is the sound of an entire decade: the sampled-drum machine that put real kicks, snares and hats into pop, R&B and new wave...
If one synth defines the lush, shimmering pads of the 1980s, it is the Juno-60. Six voices of digitally-controlled analog oscillators, a gorgeous 24dB resonant low-pass filter sharing the same...
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,...
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...
The Roland JSQ-60 is a slice of early-80s sequencing history: a digital keyboard recorder that captures your performances and plays them back to compatible Roland synths via DCB and MIDI....
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 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...
Roland's SRV-2000 is a 1U slice of mid-80s digital reverb that has aged into a proper character box. It pairs early digital reverb algorithms with a built-in 3-band parametric EQ,...
The Quad 34 is the elegant preamplifier at the heart of Quad's celebrated 1980s system. Compact, beautifully made and famously musical, it offers disc, radio and tape inputs, tilt and...
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...
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 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...
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...
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 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....
If you opened any 90s project studio rack, the QuadraVerb was probably already in it. Alesis built a multi-effects box that ran EQ, reverb, delay and chorus all at once,...
Roland only sold the RDE-1800 in Japan, which is the main reason so few of these ever left the country. It pairs a digital delay with a real spring reverb...
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...
The Yamaha R1000 is one of the first affordable digital reverbs, and it has a sound all its own: a handful of reverb modes, simple knobs, and an early-digital character...
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...
