Out of the console into the 980, if you had some sort of gentle gain riding in front of it, it would help. Like any digital equipment, they come unhung when driven past their max level.
I'm trying to think where we had 980s. If memory serves, they worked allright. I think you could split the total delay into increments, which works well where you have callers who try to 'slip one in'. We ran them in three increments, even the dumbest jock could figure out s/he was being had by the third F^^&* and drop the call.
You kind of have to diddle with the automatic catchup speed, you'll find it's fornmat dependant. For voice, you can run it real fast. For music, it wants to be a lot slower, or you'll hear it working. We had DBXs in front of the 980s, the Aphex box would work well here as well.
