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...
The Prime Time (Model 93) was one of the first programmable digital delay processors, and it became an instant studio staple for its lush doubling, chorusing, and that slightly grainy...
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....
When Access dropped the Virus C in 2002, it didn't so much join the synth world as colonise it. This is the desktop module that turned up on countless trance...
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...
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...
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...
Released when most synth makers were still scared of giving you too much power, the Arturia Origin was an ambitious, misunderstood beast. Imagine stuffing a Moog Modular, ARP 2600, Jupiter-8...
Sony built consumer hi-fi that obsessed over clean signal paths, then turned the same obsession loose on a studio reverb. The DPS-R7 is a tidy 1U digital reverb from the...
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...
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 MU-R201 is Sony's twin-engine answer to the pro reverb market: two independent reverb processors in one box, so you can run two spaces at once or chain them for...
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....
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 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...
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...
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 bigger brother of the S-330 and Roland's flagship rack sampler of the era: more voices, more memory, more outputs, and the same lovably gritty 12-bit Roland conversion. With a...
The Roland GAIA SH-01 is the synth that refuses to hide anything from you. Every function gets its own knob or button, three full virtual-analog tone engines stack into one...
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...
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,...
