“It changed what we thought was possible for electric guitars”: How a $20 box designed for cheap speakers became the secret weapon behind Metallica’s massive Black Album guitar sounds

Metallica in concert at the NEC Arena, Birmingham. James Hetfield, lead singer and guitarist with the band, 4th November 1992.

When you think of the iconic guitar sounds on some of the biggest records in rock, consumer equipment definitely isn’t the first type of gear that comes to mind. But a small and mighty consumer device from SRS called The WOW Thing changed that, and proved that great guitar tones can come from the most unlikely of places.

This is the story of how a quirky, lo-fi spatial effects processor built for consumer audio became a studio secret weapon: “the little plastic box that makes guitars a big thing.”