The ambient pedal everyone fell in love with. The Hologram Microcosm chops your signal into granular fragments and rebuilds it into shimmering loops, glacial pads, hypnotic drones and glitchy, tempo-locked...

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 rackmount Tube Driver, and the one to have. This is the TDR-101 from the era when B.K. Butler and Chandler built them in partnership, widely held to be the...

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...

The Hohner Pianet T is the warm, slightly reedy electric piano that gave the Zombies, the Beatles and countless soul records their signature shimmer. Lightweight, characterful and instantly recognisable, it...

The Jupiter-Xm is Roland's love letter to its own history, shrunk into a portable, battery-powered box with built-in speakers. Its ZEN-Core engine runs authentic Model Bank recreations of the Jupiter-8,...

Akai's answer to the Juno. The AX60 is a six-voice analog polysynth from 1986, built around the same Curtis CEM3394 voice chip you will find in a clutch of classic...

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,...

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...

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 Maxon AD-150 is a rackmount bucket-brigade analog delay from the company behind Ibanez's classic effects. Warm, dark repeats, gentle modulation and that organic BBD smear digital cannot fake.A lovely,...

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,...

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...

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 legendary dbx Boom Box: an all-analog subharmonic synthesizer that doesn't just boost your bass, it manufactures it. Feed it a signal and it tracks the bass already there, synthesizes...

Before every laptop shipped with a reverb plugin that sounded fine, Lexicon was building the boxes that defined what expensive sounded like. The LXP-15 is the half-rack sibling that snuck...

There is no overstating this one. The TR-808 is the most influential drum machine ever made: the booming kick, the ticking hats, the cowbell, the snap, the sound of hip-hop,...

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...

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 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...

The M5000 was TC's flagship Digital Audio Mainframe, a modular, software-upgradable processing platform that became a studio benchmark for reverb in the 90s and never really left. Engineers still rank...

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 QuadraVerb Plus runs four effects at once, reverb, delay, pitch and EQ, in glorious 20kHz bandwidth, the upgraded version of the multi-effects box that lived in every 90s rack....

The Roland RE-501 Chorus Echo is the final, fullest evolution of the Space Echo line, and if you only ever own one tape echo, the faithful agree this is the...