2025 Holiday Buyers' Guide

Happy Holidays, and welcome to our annual Holiday Buyers’ Guide! 2025 marks 20 years of year-end guides in RECORDING, where we gather a list of great gift ideas for the recording musician in your life—even if that musician is you.

This year, our editorial staff reviewed 149 products, and for the 2025 Buyers’ Guide, we narrowed that number down to 55 favorites that any one of our team would be thrilled to find under the tree, in a stocking or, better yet, in the studio this holiday season. We’ve organized our selections into six categories: Microphones; Interfaces, Converters & Mixers; Monitors & Headphones; Studio Hardware; Instruments & Controllers; and Software.

We’ve kept the price range wide open, with products spanning from $49 to $12,000 (not a typo), and plenty of choices in between to suit the broad scope of our readership—from beginner to pro.

It was a tough process making our list and checking it twice. As in last year’s guide, we limited our picks to one product per company. If a company or product is reviewed in this issue or is featured in our expanded holiday-focused Fast Forward section on page 8, that counts toward its inclusion.

Each entry includes a quote from the original review to help guide you in your holiday gear quest.