DJ Vintage

Hi Simran, welcome to the forums. Enjoy your time here.

Officially the level coming out of XLR outputs is way higher than that out of RCA, although I have seen RCA outputs that have been pumped up to deliver identical output levels as XLR.

As Colin said you don’t get any extra headroom.

Sounds like it’s time to do a little gain staging.

Load a track into your software deck and hit play
Be sure it’s playing at 0dB average (watch the in-software meters)
Then see if you can get 0dB average on your controller channel meters using gain/trim button
Then fully open your channel fader and see if you set your master volume so the master volume meter shows 0dB average as well. Mark this setting if you can.
Finally set your speakers to 0dB if it has such a marker or a neutral central point. If both are lacking, just set it to full volume.

This should give you a 0dB overall signal path, avoiding any kind of distortion or overload. You then turn down the master volume on your controller at the beginning of the night and turn up as needed as you move along.

If you feel you are lacking sound pressure level at these settings, you will need bigger/more speakers, not drive your EVOXs higher.

Both Terry_42 and I have moved to the MCX8000 and we are both loving it!

Actually, according to the specs, the M44-7 should be the loudest as it has an output voltage of 9.5mV, where the DJ E has an output voltage of 6 mV. The shape of the actual needle has more to do with stability in the groove and tracking capabilities than with the output level.

As the are both the same techonology (moving magnet) and assuming you used them in the same TT with identical needle pressure, the same gain setting and the exact same track(s) (THIS is important if you want to do A-B comparison), one would start thinking perhaps you had a faulty example of the M44-7. Also you could have the M44-G which, like the Ortofon, is about 6mV output. But those would have had to sound as loud as the Ortofons then, which they apparently didn’t.

So, no, the needle shape won’t explain away that difference. Specs say the results should sooner be the other way around based on the output voltage.

I don’t know what to tell you here, perhaps another reader can shed some light (and enlighten me in the process).

A few points here:

1) If you mix stuff you can set the pitch range in your software to the lowest number (often 6 or even 4%), this will give you the highest “resolution”.
2) In the days of vinyl there were no BPM indicators on turntables, yet beat-matching manually was done quite succesfully.
3) In the early days of CDJ-like players BPM read-outs would be limited to no or 1 digit. Your example would show as 137 or 137,0.
4) It is highly unlikely you can get two tracks pitched perfectly using pitch faders. You CAN however get them close enough for a simple 16-beat transition to runs smoothly.
5) A big part of learning to manually beat match (applauding you for taking the time to teach yourself this btw) is learning how to nudge.

My challenge to you in your learning process would be to also cover up the BPM counters and try to go fully manual or “blind”. Trust your ears, practice and you will soon find out that a small nudge here and there will keep you out of trouble with prolonged transitions. There are plenty of courses that cover manual beat-matching (including DDJT courses of course) as well as loads of Youtube vids. There are a few major ways of doing it, but you will have to figure out which one you like best.

Regardless of the software you use, on average only 80% of your tracks will be able to be beat-gridded so that it can use sync and such. That and the fact that you may want to use tracks stored on other media than in your DJ software make it very good practice to learn how to manually beat-match. That said, if you use a lot of floating beat tracks and you want to use sync for all the obvious reasons as much as possible, then it pays to use software that can handle that kind of tracks the best.

Hey Yonny V, welcome to the forums. Quite a few interesting questions. First we need good definitions of what is a DJ and what a producer. The two are not mutually exclusive, so you can do both. They are however so different that gear, software, technique and knowledge and skills don’t carry over much either way. I would not suggest starting on both avenues at once. The main question you have to ask yourself is: “do I want to make my own music and share that with the world the way all music is shared, or do I want to take other peoples music and use that to take people on a musical journey as they dance and enjoy a nice evening”? If you want to make your own music, then producing would be the direction to start with, otherwise going into DJ-ing makes more sense.

The waters are muddied though, lots of DJs I would actually consider producers or live-performers, so it’s not all cut and dried.

What I CAN say is that it pays to get education. It will shorten and flatten your learning curve and start you off practicing best-practice ways of doing things which beats figuring things out yourself with trial-and-error and having to first un-learn a bad habit to then replace it with a good habit.

Good thing is that you can find courses at Digital DJ Tips like How To Digital DJ Fast (4 weeks could have you ready to play your first b’day party 😀 ) and Music Production for DJs. As they are money-back guarantee they offer a low-risk proposition.