The RZ-1 is Casio's 1986 oddball masterpiece: a 12-bit PCM drum machine with a built-in sampler, and one of the cheapest ways into that crunchy, grainy 80s sampling sound. You...
Akai's first sampler, and the box that put affordable 12-bit sampling on the map. The S612 is a single-rack 12-bit sampler with that unmistakable gritty, lo-fi early-Akai character, real-time start/end...
Yamaha's only real assault on the late-80s sampler wars, the TX16W is a 12-bit rack sampler with a character all its own: grainy, punchy, and (whisper it) arguably more pleasant...
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...
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...
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 Yamaha EM-90A is what happens when an organ, a rhythm box and a 70s lounge act throw a cocktail party and accidentally record the whole thing to 8-track. It...
Roland's 12-bit rack sampler from the late 80s. The S-330 packs the same characterful converters as its keyboard siblings into a tidy 1U box, complete with that gritty, slightly lo-fi...
Vintage tape at its most beautiful. The Akai M-7 is an early-to-mid 1960s tube reel-to-reel, a four-track, four-speed semi-professional deck with separate valve amplifiers for each channel, twin glowing VU...
The Planet Phatt is E-MU's love letter to hip-hop, trip-hop and old-school R&B. Built on the same respected sound engine as the Proteus range, it is loaded with fat analog-style...
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...
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...
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 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....
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...
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 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 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...
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 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 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...
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...
JVC's SEA (Sound Effect Amplifier) series were the EQs to have in the 70s, and the SEA-7070 is a hefty, silver-faced stereo graphic equaliser with banks of sliders for sculpting...
