Clavia's Nord Drum 2 is what happens when Swedish synth wizards aim their talents at percussion. No samples, no presets pretending to be a kit, just six channels of pure...

Clavia's original Nord Drum, the little red box that builds drum sounds from pure synthesis instead of samples. Four channels of resonant, subtractive percussion, each with click, noise and tone...

Some studio boxes are famous; the Dimension D is famous for being invisible. Roland's SDD-320 does not warble or swirl like an ordinary chorus; it uses two synced bucket-brigade delay...

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...

The 1176 is the other most-famous compressor in the world (the FET one), and this is Universal Audio's hand-built reissue of the blackface 1176LN, true to Bill Putnam's D/E-rev design....

The 1604-VLZ Pro is the mixer that earned Mackie its reputation: sixteen channels of clean, high-headroom analog with the famous XDR mic preamps, flexible four-bus routing, musical 3-band EQ and...

The Monster 2 is exactly what it sounds like: a boutique Polish dual-channel beast that bolts a fast FET compressor to a NOS-tube saturation stage and a parallel mix knob,...

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...

If you could own one stereo bus compressor for the rest of your life, a frightening number of top engineers would name the Neve 33609. Derived from the legendary 2254...

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...

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...

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 AKG BX20E is the king of spring reverbs: a torsional transmission-line spring system in its own substantial cabinet, giving long, lush, three-dimensional decays that sit somewhere between a plate...

The Boss BX-600 is a tidy little six-channel stereo mixer from Roland's Boss line: gain, pan, effect send and volume per channel, a built-in effect loop and that dependable 80s...

This is the holy grail of Sherman gear. The Quad Modular Filter takes the cult Filterbank, the snarling, screaming, envelope-following distortion filter that producers worship, and stacks four of them...

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...

If a record sounds good on NS-10s, it sounds good everywhere, which is why these white-coned Yamahas ended up on the meter bridge of nearly every serious studio on earth....

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...

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...

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...

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 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....

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...