Some gear is just so well designed and engineered, it's scary. Take Shadow Hills Industries. This small, secretive shop turns out some of the slickest looking and sounding gear around. Even their new monitor controller, the Shadow Hills Oculus, is a disturbingly awesome bit of equipment.

The designer of the Oculus, Peter Reardon, was on hand at the 129th AES show, where he gave us a close-up look at the new monitor controller. This elegant controller gives you volume, input source and output destination switching, and an extremely long pedant-to-base station cord for freedom of placement. And really, if you haven't been to the Shadow Hills Industries website, you really owe it to yourself to visit. Just make sure you've got nothing else to do for the next ten minutes.