Chuck Van Eekelen

Hi Bradley,

Welcome to the forums. Never to young to start I say. Having start with my first “gig” at 14 I know where you are at. At the time there were no true club gigs for guys that age, so mostly class, school and family functions when starting out.

Good to see the love for music. Keep at it.

Enjoy your time here.

I understand the 5000s are about 2 weeks out for delivery, the 1800 to follow about 4 weeks later. Frankly, I think the package together is better than the sum of it’s parts. So budget allowing, I’d get the mixer too. What I’ve heard blew me away. I have always liked the sound of Denon mixers/controllers, but this mixer sounds soooooo nice. Talking A&H, way beyond DJM when looking at sound quality.

But I digress.

FOR THE RECORD: This will be my personal, totally biased report of my first encounter with the new Denon Prime gear. I will write it down as I see it and feel about it. By no means is this to be an official DDJT review or anything.
These will be the ravings of an avid Denon aficionado since decades who is just very, VERY happy to see that not only his beloved Denon is back after a few years of silence (not just the Prime series, but it started in earnest with the MCX8000), but back with a MAJOR vengeance! Go Denon!

With that out of the way, I face another challenge, where to start?!?! Superlatives really don’t cover the ground here.

Let’s just start at the beginning. Like everyone I read about these first, saw the video’s at NAMM by Phil, watched the videos by Denon themselves, read articles and watched videos on other DJ sites. So, leaving for the DanceFair I felt like I already knew “them” intimately. I imagine this is what someone must feel like finally meeting an online lover for the first time. You haven’t properly met, but think you know them well already.

Little did I know.

The booth was not impressive, just your standard 6×6 or so with a back wall banner shared with some AKAI Pro gear, couple of tables with, mostly, Prime gear, a single MC7000, a single MCX8000 and I believe I saw a 4000 as well. Two pieces of AKAI gear and that was it. Here clearly the staff and the gear had to speak for itself.

I was welcomed by Paul, the Denon DJ brand manager. Having met previously at the BPM last September it was good to reconnect. He took the time to take me through a lot of the features (I can’t say all, because there is just so much there) and I spent an easy half hour+ getting the full low-down on this gear. And everytime I thought of a feature to ask about”, “does it have …?”, presto! there it was already.

I also went to see Laidback Luke do his thing on them and that was impressive. Afterwards I went back to the Denon booth and spent at least another hour talking to the Denon guys, asking questions, firing suggestions (most already implemented – duh) and fiddling around with the gear. Had a chance to meet Ross, the product manager and talk to him about the background of this product and the direction they are going with it. All highly impressive and breeding confidence in Denon’s future in the booth.

And I notice I still haven’t said a word about the actual gear and it’s features! Sorry Todd, I know you must be anxious to get the low-down on them.

Everyone can read all (well most) of what these units offer, but it is different seeing it and hearing it in real life. The units are totally solid, as you expect from Denon, and they certainly look and feel like they will easily survive many years on the road.

They look clean, buttons, knobs and faders look good, everything is where you expect it to be. Even if you don’t directly want to use stuff like the performance buttons, if you are used to CDJs, you are off on these in 1 minute flat. The layout of the performance buttons 8 in a row as opposed to 2 rows of 4 as on controllers was something I wasn’t too sure about at the beginning (muscle memory and all that), it actually does make better sense, due to the linear nature of it.

The screen is absolutely great. It’s just like having an iPad mini sitting there. The same feeling of glass under your fingers (instead of plastic), the immediate response, the multi-touch options. Intuitive control of features and settings, an option to set shortcuts to most-used settings, hit search and the on-screen keyboard pops up which is highly useful, but you can hook up a usb keyboard to one of the two USB-ports on the back (and probably to the one in the front as well), should you like that better.

I really fell in love with the multi-color wave-forms. Rather than adopting the rainbow or single color option, it’s kept to a very nice green/blue/white color scheme which is extremely pleasing to the eye and gives all the information you need in one look. Nice little touch is that the waveforms zooms in/out with the pitch-fader, giving you enough beats to work with regardless of the amount of speed up or slow down you applied. At the bottom is a full track wave-forms, or better TWO if you have a track loaded in the other layer. These also function as needle drop strips.
Red 1st downbeat markers are clearly visible and helpful for those moments you return to your decks after being distracted by someone asking you a question or coming up for a request.

Two layer operation – a rather novel concept for CDJ users but something us controller jockeys are used too – is executed well. Again, being used to this functionality from controllers it wasn’t as much of a “yeah!” sensation as it probably would be for people used to media player use. The way it’s integrated with light rings on the jogs, cue buttons on the mixer and such does impress though.

There are a lot of small things that keep surprising you as you continue exploring. For example on CDJs you have what’s known as emergency loop. If for some reason your USB-stick is removed from the CDJ, it goes into a (I believe) 8-bar loop until you got your stuff sorted. While functional, it’s a very basic solution. On the Denons, you pull the USB-stick and you have the ENTIRE track available, cue points and all. You can beat jump back to the beginning if you want to. This gives you much more time and an entire track playing through rather than being caught in a short loop.

The actual place of the USB port makes more sense too. Rather than sitting close to the back on top with the stick sticking up, it’s recessed underneath the front, out of reach of grabby hands and deep enough recessed to not being able to bump it yourself.

Another small, but powerful thing is the built-in 10 second buffer when power is dropped (they actually pull the power cord in demo). If power is restored within that time you can keep playing without the need for a full reboot of the player. If power is not restored, after 10 seconds the player will shut down properly, saving all settings and correctly shutting down the USB-stick. The latter is actually very important as improper shutdown of USB-sticks is the nr 1 reason they get corrupted. And it would be really bad that as the power returns and the player is fully booted up again, you find that your stick hasn’t survived the power outage.

I like the form factor, always have. And these are just great, the ergonomics work well, at least for me.

Oh, for those familiar with Pitch N Time, good news. PnT has really meant a step up from regular key lock operations. It gives a broader range of pitch alteration while still keeping the sound good. So that was good news for Serato users.

Now fire up the SC5000, set it to +/- 100% range, slide that fader either way and listen! The result is amazing. Being a sound engineer too I know a bit about elasticity (time stretching songs) and this is really, really impressive. Even slowed down or sped up by 98% the sound is still there with no noticeable artifacts or change in sound.

I’ve gotta stop here, but I hope this is of use to some of you.

@Todd: don’t worry, m8, you will absolute love these. There is nothing out there like it.

Thanks, appreciate the thought! 😀

Hi and welcome to the forums. Enjoy your time here. Be sure to check out the courses too!

It’s almost the exact machine I have. Bought second-hand when it was 3 1/2 years old. Mine has 16GB Ram and a 256GB SSD though. Since it’s a company you are buying from you can ask if they can swap the HD for an SSD before you buy it. 8GB RAM should be totally fine. Mine just came with 16GB, that wasn’t a purchase criteria for me.

Price seems about right. I paid 1.000 euro for mine, but it was at the time of course a bit younger and had the extra RAM and an SSD.

As for life expectancy, I can safely say that mine feels like it’s near new. Good thing is that processor development has really slowed down a lot the last 5 years. i7 is still i7 and speeds remaining in the 2.x-3.0GHz range. So there isn’t too much difference between a 3rd generation i7 and a 6th generation one as there was between processor models before.

And while an i3 would be on the low end of the scale for DJ-ing, an i5 with plenty of RAM would do nicely, the i7 is just a very nice piece of kit to have.

Again, mine is going on 5 years old, but I don’t see it dropping below specs for anything I throw at it for many years to come.

In short, try to sweet talk them into give you a nice price upgrade to a 256GB SSD and go for it!

What are you using the crossover for? Seems you have only DLX12 tops and 1 amp.

Well if you want to go Traktor our advise is to go NI controller. So that is kinda limiting your choice. If you want 4-channel and jogs then the S4 (mk2) is pretty much your only option. So choices are a tad limited.

Be aware that Traktor and the iPad Traktor are two different environments. I believe for a short time after release they would sync, but that got stopped after a while. Not sure if that function ever came back.

If you have to maintain two platforms and/or need to get used to a new one (albeit with the same name), you might consider the other options that seem a better fit for iPads and have a bit broader controller support.

That said, Not sure any iPad-centric controls out there have 4 channels and standalone functionality, not even the Mixon 4 by Reloop.

On-topic: The S4 is – to the best of my knowledge – NOT a standalone mixer. So all audio has to go through the software, in which case the question is if the iOS version of Traktor can handle 4-decks. And the answer to that question is no I believe. External/Line inputs are only supported by the full PC version of Traktor.

Hopefully some of our more Traktor-oriented readers can confirm this or set me straight.