Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)UPDATE: I've made couple of mistakes in my review; I have corrected them, typing them in capital letters.
It is not really easy come across an affordable product that actually does what it says. This device is packed with professional features that costs the fraction of high end DJ equipment. If you are looking into buying one of these, I would suggest reading its manual posted on American Audio website. I am writing this review to emphasize how well its features work. I would like to talk about a few.
The device boots up in only a couple of SECONDS and is ready for you to hit play. It almost takes no time to read the contents of your SD card. Both decks can read from one SD card, or a USB drive, at the same time.
The seamless loop and stutter start functions of the device work flawlessly. What's more is that it gives you 3 cue point / loop save buttons that you can recall any time during your performance. What's amazing is that, even if you are on a completely different song on one deck, you can call a loop from a previous played deck by pressing these buttons, seamlessly, and integrate that loop into your mix. Your loops and cue points stored in this bank doesn't even need to be on the same song.
The design of the interface is very well thought. For example, the cue/loop bank buttons I mentioned above light up red if you have saved cue points, yellow if you have saved loops. Similar idea applies to the max pitch % change selection button: Not only the display shows 4%, 8% or 16%, the button changes color from red to yellow to green respectively.
At this price, the device offers tempo lock.. well rather a pitch lock, to name it right. What this means is that you can change the speed of a song without affecting the sound (pitch) of it. Now, when you go above 4% change with this feature enabled, you can start hearing the resampling the device is doing. So, this feature is not as sophisticated as they have it on high-end Pioneer DJ equipment (resampling with segments divided perfectly in accordance to BPM), but it is still very nicely done.
Speaking of BPM, this device offers auto and tap BPM function; however, I can't really be as enthusiastic about this feature as I am about the other features. Neither the auto BPM, nor the tap BPM are accurate. They get it right within the vicinity of actual BPM of the song, but even the tap BPM does not nail it. It just has a bad function algorithm. So if you have to have a BPM readout that displays 125 when the song 125, this might not make you happy.
Back to good things: The mixer that this device offers, is a digital mixer. The curve of the crossfader can be adjusted in a menu on the display. The EQ section is also digital. The mixer is missing a "mids" section in the EQ, but it is not the end of the world. Also, the buttons for cue/headphone volume and cue pan (left or right deck) are these tiny knobs, that operating them can get a little tricky.. but still not the end of the world. The device allows you to disable the mixer and use it as two separate decks with separate outputs, if you choose to use your own mixer.
The jog wheels are very responsive and speed sensitive; whether you are searching through a song, or using it as a pitch bend, it does so according the speed you are turning the wheel. This pitch bending also allows you to bring the song to a complete stop with a "braking" effect. If you keep turning the wheel anti-clock wise, the speed of the song will go down as far as 100%.
I went through a couple of cheap all-in-one DJ gears (well known ones in the market), and none of them even come close to the "professionalism" of this device.
Highly recommended.
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