This page is not intended to provide you with perfect, detailed infos about this thing. I just happened to get one for a few days, played a bit around with it and sold it again to a kind guy from belgium. It is just my personal experiance with it. About this thing is VERY rare info on the web so i thought it might be for your interest what my humble opinion on this piece of frensh gear is. I also made some audioclips you find at the end of the page.

DHM 89 B2

The main brain is the rackunit DHM 89 B2. As far as i found out (didnt have infos, manual or similar, just plain gear) it is a true stereo 20 khz digital delay/pitsh shifter - nothing special - but it is from 1983! There are 3 samplingfrequencies selected by switch on the front. Very cool to switch while signals are running through - very grainy, downsampling sound.

There are three functionodes selected by green pushbuttons named "DELAY", "PITCHSHIFTER" and "MEMORY-LATCH".

Delay is clear, the standard unit makes delaytime of 1.2 sec/channel in 5 khz-mode and 512 ms in 10 khz. In 20 kHz-Mode it is not Stereo ony more and (should be) 256 ms. Lots of units got a memo-expansion you can recognize my a "long/short"-switch on the frontpanel. The sound is very dubby.

In pitchshift mode you got a pitshshifter which is known to be used by nameful artists of the past.

Memorylatch can freeze the memorybuffer which then is looped. You can select start- and endpoint of this loop with the crosspoint-pots. The sample reverses if you turn the right pot less wide than the left one.

The Inputs/outputs are balanced XML-jacks.

pics from front and back. The frontpic is a thumb, popping up to a laaaarge pic.

KB2000

I bought the KB2000 because i thought it is the keyboardversion of the rackthing - WROOONG!!! Without the rackunit it is just a nicelooking piece of useless wood - it is the remoteunit for the DHM but in addition expanding its capabilities a LOT!

 I must admit that i am one of these users who seem to be to dull to understand the whole function. But i guess it is not easy without manual nevertheless. First you need a specialcable to connect the two. It is a 24pin-Centronics-Male/Male. I didnt find such a cable anywhere, maybe some Commodore C64-fans have such a cable lie around somewhere. I bought an industry IEE488-Cable which has 24 pole male/male but these cables are stackable on each other and the head is in the way of the leftmost audiojack. I had to solder a special-audiocable, not professional but it worked good enought to try the unit out.

With the Rackunit you can play freezed samples chromatically on the keyboard and, which is much cooler you can manually wander through the sample in any spped, forward and backwards, kind of elastic audio. Your position is indicated with a cool led-row for each channel left and right. I heard about a possibility for triggering the sample externally. But the whole thing is clumsy - interesting sound but not very reproducable or predictable results - nothing for me. You turn the pots and turn and turn, everything sounds somehow cool and interesting - but not useful.

The KB2000 has a jack for an external pedal , audio in for microphone, a LFO-Section with adjustable waveform (tri to square), LFO delay.

Here are some detailed pix, klick on the monster-thumbs to get some monster-pix:

some notes to the demotracks

track 1 demontrates the delay with various samplingfrequency-changes and memorylatch at the end.

track 2 shows the pitchshifting, also differnet samplingfrequencies and memory latch

track 3 and 4 were recorded using the keyboard. in track 3 i tried to show the pitchshiftng and the lfo (right side of kb2000) whish has pots for lfo-speed/waveform ("sharpness") and attack/Release-pots for the lfo-pitchmodulation at the end of track

track 4 shows the timefreezing/independant speed by maintaining pitch.

dont expect too much from the tracks, it was just some parameter tweaking but i guess you will get an idea. i played around about an hour, quite a nice machine if you spend some time with it.