I was one of the first to buy in Paris ... in 1984 and cost a blind (nearly 5,000 francs, or more than two months of SMIC).

I stopped to use it in 1989 when I went with an 8-track YAMAHA MTX 8 But I kept it for that one day when I have time to duplicate my tapes on PC. I rowed with so I could not bring myself to throw it away or give it away.

What I loved most: the mobile side, simple to use and very innovative. The DBX was well dynamics. You could also saturate without the sound becomes necessarily yucky (long live analog!).

What I liked least: the extreme fragility of cassettes that supported hard excess rewind or punch in / out; also difficult to resolve and sounding preamps easily and hard metal (in this respect, the Yamaha MTX8 sounded much better); unbalanced jack inputs only (exit condenser microphones); often random and hard to control the long keys of the cassette; and then 4 tracks, it's short and the unit resented copies from track to track (merge) because the signal deteriorated horribly at each transfer.

Technologically, it is obviously archi outdated, but it's still a very respectable museum piece: it is with this contraption home studios have democratized.

PS Jeremy Gerard found the manual in pdf scanned on google; and just explore just to understand how it works.