I payed 75 EUR for it (less than 100 US$) and given the condition of the module, that was a good price. Little bonus: it turned out to be formerly owned by Ron Boots, a Dutch electronic musician.

The sounds are nice, be it a bit mediocre in character. I only have the additional Dry Set and the Ambiance Set. Those and the internal sounds, do not provide any stunning or strange sounds. There are kicks, snares, toms, bells, open and closed hi hats, rides, bonga-ish sounds and an orchestra hit. The kicks are nice, but don't expect booming 909-like stuff. The toms are full and with a nice tone. Most snares are a bit thin but fairly useable. The hi-hats are okay, even a bit too "fat" (but nothing EQ can't fix).

The sound quality is excellent, though. Lot's of dynamics, no disturbing noise and the samples are good. Only one snare seems a bit chopped off, but some programming in the envelope could fix that.

The interface is quite logical, but the fact that you only have two push buttons and two dial buttons for all the settings, makes is a bit of a tedious job to change things. And you need the manual to know what the 2-digit LCD characters (mostly numbers, but sometimes 'A' or 'b') mean.

What I miss is some kind of "confirm" or "store" button. Settings are stored instantly and only switching on the memory protection can prevend you from screwing things.

The machine can hold up to 32 programs. Each program can hold up to 16 sounds, chosen from any of the 48 available: internal, front ROM card or rear ROM card. In each program you can tune/tweak each of the 16 sounds.

For each of the 16 sounds you can independantly determine to what keyrange it responds. So you can have either 16 separate ranges with each a different sound, you can layer 16 sounds under one key or anything in between those two.

There are some ways to modulate things with pitch, modwheel or key position, but I haven't been through that yet.

You can program a pitch-sweep and there's a simple attack-decay envelope to be programmed for the volume.

The XE8 has 9 outputs: 1 mix and 8 separate. Each of the 16 sounds in a program can be sent to any one of those 8 outputs. There's also a setting to let the machine "roll" through the outputs, so that each consecutive sound it played to a new output.

A little downside for me are the screws on the bottomplating. When put on top of another modules or when pushed in a rack setup, it scratches.

What might also be a bit of a problem if you own more than 2 cards, is the rear slot. In a rack you would only be able to change the front card (unless you're willing to unscrew things or have the possibility to reach the rear of the rack).

It's a rare machine. The reason can't be that nobody wants to sell his. I just think not much units were sold, because of lack of character and the amount of competition in this range.