Hi Marty, nice story and thanks for the kind words. Glad we were able to contribute to your journey.
Using regular monitor speakers for anything “live” is never a good idea. They are just not made for the purpose.
The iDJ Pro (I have one) is an extremely loud controller. If you want to use your channel knobs to full, opening your master volume even a little bit will blow the volume through the roof. I always end up turning the master volume in DJAY WAYYYYY down, until I can open the master volume on the iDJ Pro to about 12 o’clock for normal volume with lots of headroom if the volume needs to go up at anytime.
The red light on the speakers going off sometimes isn’t too bad. It’s an indication that the peaks are reaching clipping (but not quite there yet) and that means you are in a good place. If you are behind the speakers it’s impossible to judge how loud the speakers are actually playing, you have to go listen in front of your speakers. Walk around the dance area and see/listen.
For monitoring purposes, one way to go about it is to get a (used) 8″ or 10″ active PA speaker and hook that up. How you will say, there is no booth out on the iDJ Pro. True, there isn’t. So you need to do something else. Easiest would be to get the smallest pa mixer you can find (used is fine, but get a decent brand) that has at least one AUX channel. Hook the master out from your controller up to (one of) the mixers stereo channel(s). Now you can send the right amount of signal to the aux channel and control the volume of your monitor independent of your master output. It can also help reign in the volume of the controller a bit if you need to.
One to consider is the Mackie Mix8. Slightly under 100 euro here and offers 2 mic and 2 stereo inputs and an aux out with master aux volume control.
Hope that helps some.
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