DKN Studio 7400 Review: 80kg of Multi Gym for Under £500

DKN is a French fitness brand that has quietly sold cardio and strength kit in the UK for years without ever making much noise about it. The Studio 7400 is its compact home multi gym: an 80kg stack, five stations, and a footprint of 165cm by 105cm that fits in a garage or a large spare room without a rebuild. It lists at £799 on DKN's own site and sells for around £499 on Amazon UK, which is the number that makes it interesting.

At that price it sits between the flimsy sub-£300 machines and the twin-stack units that cost four figures. What you get for the money is a well-built single-stack gym with a genuinely useful spread of stations, held back by an assembly experience that owners have been complaining about for years.

Who it is for

Someone training alone at home who wants guided resistance work covering the whole body, with no spotter and no barbell. It suits general strength and conditioning, rehab-adjacent training, and anyone who wants to lift without the technical learning curve of free weights.

Experienced lifters chasing a heavy squat or deadlift should spend the money on a power cage and a barbell instead. An 80kg stack is a ceiling, and there's no upgrade path.

Stations and what they cover

The high pulley handles lat pulldowns, triceps pushdowns and straight-arm work. The low pulley covers rows, curls, upright rows and cable kicks. Between them you can build a complete pull session, and the lat pulldown alone justifies half the machine for anyone who can't yet do pull-ups.

The dual-action chest station is the clever part: it gives you a chest press and a pec deck from the same seated position without changing attachments, which saves the faff that makes people skip chest work on cheaper machines. The one-piece butterfly press handles the fly pattern.

An adjustable preacher pad bolts on for curls, and the leg developer at the bottom covers leg extensions and leg curls. That leg station is where taller users hit the limits first; the pad positions suit somewhere around average height best.

Build quality

For £499, the frame is better than it needs to be. At 144kg the machine does not shift under a hard pulldown, the upholstery is thick enough to still be comfortable after a year, and the guide rods run smoothly once the cables have bedded in over the first few sessions. Owner reviews cluster around the same praise: it feels considerably more solid than the price suggests, and the pulleys stay quiet.

The double pulley with micro adjustment deserves a mention. Small increments matter more on a machine than they do with dumbbells, because you can't half-load a plate, and being able to make a 2 or 3kg change rather than a 5kg one keeps progression sensible on smaller movements like curls and lateral work.

The assembly problem

Every honest review of this machine lands here. Owners repeatedly describe the build as taking four to seven hours, and the instruction manual as the single worst part of the product. The parts themselves fit properly; the documentation just doesn't explain the order clearly enough.

Practical advice from people who have done it: get two people, sort and label every bag of fixings before you touch a bolt, work from the exploded diagrams rather than the text, and assemble the machine in its final position because 144kg is not something you slide across a garage afterwards. Set aside a Saturday and treat any earlier finish as a bonus.

Where it falls short

The 80kg stack is the honest limit. For most people it will take years to outgrow, but strong lifters will max out the pulldown and chest press within months, and DKN offers no stack upgrade.

Single-station design means one person trains at a time, which is fine for an individual and frustrating for a couple. And a multi gym, however good, cannot replicate the pattern of a loaded squat: research comparing closed chain training against machine-based open chain work found different regional growth patterns from the two, which is a technical way of saying they complement each other rather than substitute. Add a weight bench and some dumbbells if you have the space and the budget.

Value

Against the rest of the market it holds up well. The Marcy MWM-990 is the obvious rival at a similar price with a smaller stack, and the Senshi Japan multi gym undercuts both on cost while giving up build quality. Our multi gym guide puts the whole field side by side.

The Studio 7400's case rests on that £499 Amazon price against a £799 list. At £799 it would be a hard sell next to twin-stack machines. At £499 it is one of the better ways to get a complete guided strength setup into a UK garage, and it makes hitting the NHS target of strengthening work on at least two days a week genuinely convenient.