First set of CDJs

**Luconia** · 02-12-2012, 05:53 AM

is it the 1st gen cdj 1000?

**dao** · 02-12-2012, 06:52 AM

They are mk2's

**fullenglishpint** · 02-12-2012, 07:35 AM

That's not a bad price for mk2s but they are missing quite a few features that you find on more modern decks. I have CDJ-850s which I got for £500 a piece (a little out of your price range but if you scour eBay and gumtree you could get lucky), and they're great. They play all kinds of CDs and USB sticks, and they have midi and HID support. I use mine with serato and the response is brilliant with HID, but if you're planning on using trad CDs anyway that's probably not an issue. They have a nice big 1000 style jog wheel.

**dao** · 02-12-2012, 07:41 AM

fullenglishpint - like you say 1000mk2s are seriously out of date now and newer cdjs so many more features, I am struggling to justify the cost. How did you find yours for such a good price?

**fullenglishpint** · 02-12-2012, 07:46 AM

I got them individually about 2 or 3 weeks apart, if I remember correctly one was from gumtree and the other was eBay. The key is to look for items that are local pickup only within a few miles of you (do you have a car? It helps, both of mine were from people in London). Local pickup limits the market and keeps the price down on eBay, and there are often people looking to sell quickly on both the aforementioned sites so they don't charge full price.

I think I paid £970 in total for both and they are still in mint condition, I also got my mint DJM-800 for £670 with a bit of good luck on eBay. My biggest piece of advice is to be patient - there are normally quite a lot of these available and they go for quite a surprising range of prices, so don't get caught up in a bidding war when there'll be another one along soon.

Best of luck!

**DJ Millenium Falcon** · 02-12-2012, 10:24 AM

Out of curiosity why is MP3/ USB playback such an important feature on CDJ's. As most PC's have a CDR burner why is it more convenient to have a tune on a dongle or whatever. I assume that on a USB device you could store dozens more tracks than you could on a CD (and at a high bitrate too), but is it not too much effort trying to locate your tracks when there's so many of them on the one device. I spoke to a DJ a few years ago who said at first they were tempted to have 20 tracks on every CD in their record box but for the sake of clean organisation it was better just to only have a few per CD, sort of like how it's rare for a 12" to have more than 4 tracks on it.

**fullenglishpint** · 02-12-2012, 10:29 AM

Well you can organise a USB stick into folders however you like, so instead of carrying a wallet of 50 CDs around you could (if you wanted) have a USB stick which fits in your pocket with 50 folders. Then all you have to do is scroll, which is much quicker than messing around with CDs. A USB stick can't get scratched either.

**DJ Millenium Falcon** · 02-12-2012, 10:56 AM

That sounds okay. I suppose I was thinking in terms of it encouraging DJ's to show up with their ipod full of shitty sounding illegal MP3s at atrociously low bitrates. Is sound quality an issue, ie. do the files on a dongle sound as good as CD's.