Hey Ray,
I haven't heard the WBs personally, but they have a good rep. There is a fellow who is supposed to be good at refurbing WB stuff-

drthomas@telus.net

Good luck with it, David

I have 4 channels of WB - M441 pre's and 402b EQ's. The pre's have an IC front end-739 IC, same as every channel of Studer A80's...and transformer balanced output. The EQ's are transformer balanced in and active balanced(ic's) output...but they sound incredibly sweet for IC based EQ's. So when people say WB's are Neve-like I wonder what neve's they've been listening to....topology and sound wise they are not similar at all. more API punchy if you want a big name comparison...anyways, i digress.

Later models aren't always as good - 460 and 461 are much better than the 470/490/522's that show up on Ebay all the time.

Your money could be better spent unless you know what you are after and what you are looking at. Racking might consist of changing a couple caps and wiring up xlr's but it could be alot more extensive as well which would negate the inexpensive modules.

Also, because many are broadcast modules you can expect anything with an EQ in it to have a steep LPF around 15kHz.