I bought the console in Paris, from Gil Martini, formely head of tech at SSL France. The desk was formely installed at a kids TV station in Paris and maintained by Gil all through it's previous life.
I looked at a number of desks during my lengthy search for a console and what convinced me about this one, apart from Gil's warm and friendly personality, was the measurements I took from all the channels. I basically ran a 0Hz - 44kHz frequency sweep (at 88kHz sample-rate) from each channel's line input to the post VCA output of the centre section by using the Mac OS software
http://www.fuzzmeasure.comWhereas the results of other consoles I looked at where extremely random, Gil's console gave me a straight line from about 15Hz to 40kHz. The line looked astoundingly similar on all 48 Channels except 2 or 3 which Gil fixed on the spot - very impressive!
The console was setup, completely functional, and sounding very clean when inspected, so it was an easy decision to go for it.