Buying used pioneer gear and i need help

<span style=”line-height: 1.5em;”>Things to look for are a) see & hear it work! With USB, with CD and hooked up to a laptop. Take a real close look at the display that it’s fully functional. Remember that CD-players (the lasers) need to be (re)calibrated once in a while. Ask when that was done last.</span>

Check for excessive wear, check for signs of liquids ever being on the units (they’ll probably be polished but you never know). If you think you’ll get an honest answer, you will want to ask if it was used in non-smoking environments (predominantly anyway). Smoke has a habit of killing gear, quietly and invisibly.

<span style=”line-height: 1.5em;”>Scratches and other signs of hard use are obvious tell tales on how the units were treated.</span>

With serious gear like the Pioneer, chances are more than average that it was used in a production environment. In that case many people will have used it (venues have multiple DJs each night, several nights a week sometimes). And since it was not their gear, pretty fair to assume that some of them didn’t treat the gear very delicately.

Long story short. Be sure of where the gear came from. Check for price of comparable used gear online and if the ones you are looking at sound to good to be true … the probably are.

Final word. Remember that Pioneer stuff keeps its value, so you are gonna pay a relatively large amount of money (especially compared to your S4 set-up). Saw a pair of 900s without a mixer (granted, used only at home and looking brand-new) go for over 1.7k euro! Add another 600-800 for a mixer and you are looking at 2.3 to 2.5k for used gear. With no guarantee. Repairs are not cheap.

Buy it if it feels right, looks right and the price is about right. Any of those off? Don’t buy.

Hope that helps a bit & greetinx.

You read my post before I edited it. I thought you were getting a non-midi mixer and then reread your OP and saw that you were planning on getting the 900NXS which IS midi. If you get the right mappings, I think you can get the same functionality.

First off, using the displays on 900s and 2000s for tracks selection is a pain, imho. Try it and you’ll know what I mean. Not too bad if you take a relatively small collection with relatively small playlists it’ll be ok, but trust me when I say you don’t want to me a mobile DJ out on a night without a fixed set (which is just about every gig) with a thousand+ tracks on a USB stick and trying to find something in a hurry of quickly listen to a few different tracks to determine which one fits best.

If I go to a gig these days with a 2000(NXS) set-up I bring my laptop. Plug in two usb leads and presto! Mixvibes Cross with all the browser functionality and stuff. I hook up the mixer too if it’s midi and send the preview signal to one of the free channels on the mixer. I can preview tracks faster than I could with CD’s. I can make smartlists on the fly, easily see which tracks are harmonically compatible and lot’s of other stuff those little CDJ displays won’t give me.

I am at the point that I’d actually rather bring my CD-wallet to a gig than USB sticks (although I will bring them as backup), if I can’t bring my laptop. No problems with right formatting and stuff. And crate digging works better for me when I can see all the CD’s.

It’s great gear, I love the feel of full size players/platters. I play on 900s and 2000s somewhat regularly and own a set of Denon DN-SC2900s. I am perfectly happy playing on my Denon MC6000 controller too though.

So, what is my advice? Learn how to use your CDJ gear with just CDs or USB sticks, but mostly use it with a laptop hooked up (don’t worry about the mixer mapping, it has all the FX and such inside).

You get the best of both worlds, the feel of real CDJs and the browsing, waveforms and such from DJ software.

Greetinx.

Just for a references, i bought used a pair of CDJ 900 plus the used DJM 900 NXS, about a month ago, around $ 2918.21, both in pretty good conditions at least above 90% with no boxes of course tough,

2000 vs 900:

• <span style=”line-height: 16px;”>DVD (not just CD)</span>
• Better, full color, display
• Lighted jogwheel edge (you can see which one is active when linked with the mixer
• Tension adjust (how “heavy” you want your jogwheel to feel
• Needle search (searching inside track, browser functionality)
• Slipmode (music goes on underneath while you do stuff, like backspins, scratches, fx and such)
• NO Hot Cue buttons on the 2000! 4 of them on the 900
• SD Card slot

So, it depends on a few things (and we are back at the what kind of DJ are you, what are you trying to achieve questions). For some hot cue heavy user DJs the lack of those on the 2000s is enough to turn them on to the 900s. Others love the display so much better or any of the other features. There is a budget issue too of course, new the difference is several hundred dollars.

Finally, if you want the decks to practice without laptop primarily, I think the 2000s are your best bet if you can live without the 4 hot cue buttons. If you want to get a feel for pure CDJ DJ-ing, but will be using them mostly as controllers for your software, I think I’d save my money and go with the 900s.

Greetinx.

Needle search. Uhm, don’t think so. It does as advertised, let’s you jump to any point in the waveform. Probably will have a snap-to function, but I only use it when searching for a particular part of a track.

Midi on CDJs. Nope, don’t think that can be done. You’d always need a laptop, in which case you could hook up the LPD8 or something and use IT for cue points.

Preview. Don’t believe so. Have to load it, press play, press cue, then load the next track. (told you, you were gonna lose some functionality LOL).

Greetinx.

Hey, nothing wrong with preview. I was VERY adept at inserting, previewing and ejecting CD’s. I could do an entire CD in less than 2 minutes, easy LOL.

You see, for my style of DJ-ing, I can’t do mounts of preparations. The night could go in any direction and I need to adapt to it. I can’t show up with a prepped two-hour set or anything. So for me being able to scroll through various potential tracks (and tossing them in a preparations list or crate) is a must, not a wish.

I’d go with what works best for you. If you have the skills to adapt to varying circumstances gear-wise, so much the better. But take yourself as a measure, not what other people think, say, use, whatever.

Greetinx.

Yeah, but not many NXS around on the second-hand market yet 🙂