Jeff, the long embarassing and unnecessary story of my API console, remember you sort of asked fr it. Back circa early nineties I had this 2488. It was awesome, sounded justlike a record, run signal through, mix it, damn everybodys always happy. Then I needed better routing, I just had to have better routing, one gain pot and 4 selectable sends would not do it any longer. "I'll redo the input modules." at the time the only thing I did worse than upgrade things was probably run a studio. Anyhow I pull out my gigantic box of schematics that doubled as a user manual and got the schemo for the 515, pulled one out of the board, opened it up, shut it very gingerly and started shopping for SSL's. A nightmarish mess of brittle wires and breaky switches. Stripped my eq's out of the board and traded it for a bunch of racks of 212 pres and off the console went. I missed it for mixing, but offline editing on the SSL taught me a lot about how to hit 1/2 in tape but you quickly learn to miss a 325 driven buss output. Anyhow, frickin years pass, sell the studio, get an EE degree, end up in virginia. It's 2009, I'm cruising the API listings on the ebay. "dang that console looks familiar..." and further down the listing sez twas in the egyptian room in new orleans. Whoa, my frikkin console, on the ebay. Turns out its 20 miles down the road from where I was living. owner had proven himself the man I would never be and contracted PW to redesign the input module circa early 2000's. I get the console to my ex partner in the san francisco studio and I inherit some eq's, a lot of extra circuit boards and a box full of my old nemesis the original 515 modules. Sold of the original ones to someone on the cheap who decided not to refurbish them if I recall correctly.
I contemplate getting a bucket running as a mixer but there is a dang darn burrbrown for the line input gain which really curdles my cheese. Probably I'll just rack up the ones I have running as I need dough to get parts of this console yr doing together. The original input transformers abound in various states of usability and crustiness, classic api output EA transformers have been on the output of the couple of racks I've made from them.