Ibanez DUE400

The DUE400 was made in the mid-late 80's, a sort of primitive multi-fx box, and features four effects: analog compressor, analog distortion, digital chorus/flange and digital delay. With the effects themselves, control is real simple, because sliders are provided for all parameters (3-5 sliders for each effect). The right side of the front panel mostly controls the FET-based patchbay (which is the difference between these units and the old UEs, which had an old fashioned "manual patchbay"), and this section is a little more difficult to comprehend and operate. However, the flexibility it offers is just plain awesome-- any order of effects can be selected and there is also an FX send and sub out that can be patched in at any point in the chain. The box stores up to 127 user patchbay configs in its memory but, alas, no effect settings other than chorus/flange mode and long/short delay time are retained, so whatever you've got your sliders set to at the time of patch activation is, well, it. Pretty complex stuff initially, but overall the effect controls are very self-explanatory (if only the print could be just a tad bigger!).
Mine didn't come with a footswitch, but midi patch control is provided, so this solves that problem. In fact I'm not sure these ever came with a footswitch...

This box sounds very warm on the whole, as you might expect from a unit from said time period, although i wish the effects allowed a bit more room for extreme, utter wackiness; they're pretty conservative and utilitiarian.
The compressor is *very* noticeable, perhaps a bit too much for me, but it's pretty cool regardless. Distortion, so i'm told, is the tubescreamer sort of circuit and i really like the sound of it-- although i could wish for just a bit more bite and a bit less noise (this is particularly bad with the gain turned up). It's a warm, crunchy overdrive sound with no hint of transistor "scrape" and a fairly wide range of tones, from very mild to "getting up there." Not gonna be my main distortion sound, but definitely useful.
Chorus/flange and the delay are both excellent, intimate sounding effects. With the chorus I'd feel totally comfortable playing Cure covers (although I won't), and the flange offers a fair amount of yummy speaker-thrashing throatiness at higher Q settings. You get up to 2sec in the delay section-- the only thing i'd want with the delay is a bit more regeneration, as even with feedback maxed you only get about 8-9 echoes before the sound's totally gone. These sections are very quiet and true to their digital roots without being sterile at all; they just fine through my oldest amps.
With the effects together, particularly once distortion is thrown into the mayhem, things get pretty noisy, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with a decent noise gate or hush. For me it's not a big issue anyway, since I doubt I'll be using the distortion much with anything except for the delay and maybe the compressor. I'd rather save that lush chorus for clean tones; chorused/flanged distortion is a bit too, well, 80's retro for me. :)
Very nice sounds out of this box, as long as you can live with the occasional bout of noise. Even without effect memory, I definitely dig this more than any digi-multi i've tried from the last five-six years.

Seems pretty solid to me, everything is working fine. I guess I'll just have to see. The previous owner gigged it for a long time and never had any issues. It'll probably never leave my studio, as I don't want to put something this difficult-to-find at risk on the road.

no idea. i've never had a problem with any of my ibanez products... even soundtanks... :)

I have no idea what these are worth. I've seen a few of them for sale in the last year at slightly higher prices than I paid; still, for the person who needs a few more stompboxes around, this is a real good deal (at less than $150 or so) and sounds better than the vast majority of stuff being made presently. A neat tool to have around the house.