I used one of those for several sessions in the early 90's. We didn't have any complaints at all with the sound quality. It was more or less on par with the other consoles we'd used at some other studios back then (A&H, Trident, Scorpion, Soundcraft) Just maybe a tad higher noise-floor, but that could have been somewhere else in their system.

We were recording to Otari 2" tape and this console allegedly had what was loosely called automation that could be printed mix data to tape. We were only to do one song at this studio, had a beautiful mix happening and were ready to record the final mix to DAT (the master medium of the time). Then the in-house engineer insisted since we had this thing right where we wanted it, we should print the automation info to the tape before recording the final mix. That turned out to be a big mistake, something went haywire in the process and without anyone touching a button, knob, or slider the mix went completely to crap. We spent a couple hours after that trying to get our mix back to where it was before the 'automation' and never did completely recreate the magic. It was almost like a HAL 9000, willfully preventing us from getting our good mix back. "I'm sorry... I can't let you do that Dave.... "

So all in all, a respectable analog console of the era - don't trust the 'automation' feature.

There's a yahoo group for SW products. I didn't think the 34 Series had automation, but maybe they did. If I remember correctly, the 34 was introduced right after the SW line was bought out by Otari, but before they got into the really big frame models (like the Elite and the President). Pretty good sounding, straight ahead engineering and components.

You certainly could be right Moonbaby, it may have been one of the larger SW models that HAL'ed us.

The boards did have an automation called ARMS. Some people like it, some don't. I probably wouldn't have a need for it since I'll be running a hybrid setup through my DAW.

i used one once in LA it was alright. eq's were ok, mic pre's were fine. not an API though!! SW was an incarnation of some API techs who went on their own or something like that to make a new console.
what are they asking for the board, ive never seen them go for more than 3-4k

The one's I'm looking at are all about 3k. There was one with an API master section and API pre's asking 6k. Thing was pretty killer though.