I had the whole stack of DBX gear with my lo-fi system years back. It did make all sound better (I thought less compressed, more reolving), but, again, that was in a low end system (Nikko receiver, Gerard ($80 in 1978) TT, Ceramic Cartridge, home made speakers. When I upgraded to something a bit better (Cerwin Vega D-9's, Luxman R107 Receiver, Techinques SL3300 TT & Grado cartridge) I wasn't sure how much better the DBX made it sound, but stil thought better. It was always a plus when recording cassetts on my Yamaha Cassette player but cassetts is a pretty poor medium--at least on the $200 Yamaha (I'm sure a different experience on a Nak Dragon).
When I upgraded to what I currently have, I realized all the interconnects and the DBX gear just added too much garbage into the signal chain and gave all to a buddy who uses reel to reels to record FM & Vinyl. He, too, chucked all when he got an Alesis Masterlink. I know feel that with proper, highly resolving and revealing gear, the outboard DBX is not needed. My reel to reel (still not working) does have DBX encoding, and I will use it when it gets up and running, but adding all those interconnects for the outboard gear just didn't add anything, except distortion. Keep in mind, outboard DBX gear originally intended to "uncompress" what they belived to be, at the time, compressed vinyl, compressed FM (and tape). We now know that you can't add something that isn't there---and that vinyl isn't compressed (at least in high quality recordings).
