Pioneer or Allen & Heath

Hi there Karlton.

The beautiful thing about people is, we are all different and have different tastes and preferences. The question here is, why did you really post this question? Are you trying to justify your own decisions? Do you want an Allen & Heath mixer, or are you happy with your Pioneer?

Ultimately, you have the choice of what you want to play on and if you think about it too much you might choose based on someone else’s preferences. I can say this and that about each of the mixers, but it’s entirely down to what YOU want, or need, for your particular preference.
I could convince you to get an Allen & Heath, or I could convince you to stick with Pioneer, but you will only hear what you want to hear.

My advice is, only you know what you want and you are more than capable of making that decision. You can read a million reviews and opinions, but why allow other people to control your future, when they don’t even know who you are. Do what feels right in your heart and pick whatever you truly want. You need no justification.

Enjoy.

Such a pity you have ordered the XDJ1000s already. Could have sold your 400s, added that money to your XDJ1000 budget and gone for the Prime series by Denon. That is as close as you will get to playing on a controller in the form factor of media players with a mixer. The Prime X1800 mixer is actually a lot cheaper than the DJM900NX2.

Yes, you will say, but I would only have two decks! Not quite, the SC5000 players feature (amongst a lot of other awesome features like the absolute industry-best elastic audio so you can go up/down 100% in speed without any noticable audio problems) a dual layer option. For that reason the players have dual soundcards, so you can hook two players up to the mixer and have 4 faders like you would on a controller.

Some big names have already made the jump, from Paul Oakenfold to Laid Back Luke (watch his blog to seem him demonstrate the dual layer option) and from Oliver Helden to Tiesto, just to name a few.

So for about 5.100 euro (prices here) you’d have two SC5000s and an X-1800 vs a two XDJ-1000/DJM900NX2 setup for 4.900.

Those 200 extra will get you a set that is so much sweeter …

I saw, touched and played with this stuff at the DanceFair a month ago and you have to experience it to understand what this gear is like.

Back on-topic: the Denon X-1800 mixer I HAVE heard and it sounds totally fabulous, right up there with the best things on the market.

Didn’t want to add to your pre-decision stress levels, but had to share this.

…can you elaborate on the VU levels of the pioneer mixers being sloppy?

In my experience, I started to notice that levels on the channel VU meters were not giving me the expected results on my master levels. One track would show louder but play quieter and other such anomalies. Now, things like that can happen all on their own depending on how tracks are mastered (after all the channel meters are an approximate sum of all sound on the channel and not a detailed breakout) BUT it seemed to be happening a lot more often when playing on Pioneer mixers. So I ran a test one night and played the same track on both decks and totally matched up the volumes and levels, and there it was – despite the sound being equal – the two meters were out of whack by a couple of notches.

Is it a deal-breaker? No. If the mixer had everything else you wanted I would say not to worry about it – you’ll adapt. But it was odd and at these prices, shouldn’t be happening. Most annoying was that whenever I brought it up people would imply I didn’t know how to set up gear properly. And then when the NXS2 came out I saw an interview with a Pioneer rep, and sure enough, one of the things he mentioned was that they tightened up the meters. So yay, I wasn’t crazy after all! lol

So again, it’s not a deal-breaker – I think it is more just a case of Pioneer being lazy because they can ride on their “industry standard” label and not have to fix the little details that their competitors are forced to address. Sort of like how Apple chooses to ignore certain long standing issues because, you know, “#$&^ you we’re Apple.”