The Behringer Composer Pro is the workhorse dynamics box that's lived in budget racks forever, and for good reason: two channels of compressor, peak limiter, expander and gate with the...
Yamaha's 1977 single-VCO monosynth, and a proper sleeper. One oscillator, a gloriously gloopy multimode filter that switches between low, high and band-pass, an LFO that hits volume, pitch, cutoff or...
Yamaha's clever 1979 take on the preset mono. One section gives you 29 instant presets for grab-and-go sounds, the other is a fully tweakable manual synth with a single VCO,...
Cheap when it launched, legendary ever since. The Roland SH-101 was the synth "for the rest of us", a 32-key monosynth in red, grey or blue that you could sling...
Korg's 1981 game-changer: real six-voice analog polyphony at roughly a third the price of a Prophet-5 or OB-X, which is exactly why it ended up under so many 80s hands....
The Xpander is, quite simply, one of the most revered analog synthesizers ever built: a six-voice, keyboardless powerhouse that is essentially half a Matrix-12. Each of its six voices is...
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...
In 1972, the ARP Odyssey was the duophonic answer to the Minimoog: punkier, weirder, and bristling with sliders where Moog had knobs. Decades later, Korg teamed up with original designer...
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 PolyBrute is Arturia's six-voice analog flagship and one of the most expressive synths of the modern era. Two Brute oscillators per voice run into dual analog filters (the steely...
Behringer's CRAVE took one look at the price of a vintage mono synth and lopped off a couple of zeros. Under the hood: a proper analog 3340 oscillator, a creamy...
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...
The Moog Prodigy is the scrappy kid who wore only black and could outplay anyone in a riff battle. Released in 1979 as Moog's answer to rising competition, it was...
Before Eventide made pitch-shifting respectable and digital FX racks took over studios, MXR quietly unleashed the 129 Pitch Transposer: a gritty, unpredictable, slightly drunk box of pitch-warping chaos. It was...
Tascam took Antares Auto-Tune, the technology that quietly rewired pop music, and bolted it onto a proper channel strip. The TA-1VP is a full vocal chain in a single rack...
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,...
Roland's first stab at semi-modular synthesis, from 1975, and quietly one of the best-sounding things the company ever built. This is a three-module rig: the 101 keyboard synth at the...
The Warm Audio WA76 is a faithful, fully-discrete take on the legendary 1176 FET compressor, the one that has slammed drums, vocals and bass on countless hit records. Lightning-fast attack,...
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...
The Joemeek SC4 brings the cult British photo-optical compression sound to the stereo bus: smooth, vibey gain reduction that flatters mixes, drums and vocals with character rather than clinical control.The...
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...
The Prophet 12 was Dave Smith's triumphant 2013 return to the Prophet line, and the first to break from pure analog. Twelve voices of hybrid synthesis: four digital oscillators per...
The 160S is dbx founder David Blackmer's high-end reimagining of his own legendary 160 VCA compressor, hand-built in the boutique Blue Series. A true-stereo (or dual-mono) VCA compressor with that...
