Kerpow!
Kerpow!
CLUB OF JACKS - RELEASES >>TRAXSOURCE
Club of Jacks are a London based House & Garage production / DJ duo with releases on a number of underground labels including Plastik People Recordings, Blockhead Recordings, Hi Energy!, Pocket Jacks Trax, Soul Revolution Records and their own Club of Jacks imprint.
In my opinion - The Ecler Evo 5 is far and away the best mixer on your list. The hardware is remarkable; it's very well made, sounds amazing, and has lots of options, and is totally Traktor certified so you can plug in four turntables if you want. Or four CD players or any combination of pretty much anything, it's all MIDI compatible so you can reassign knobs at your leisure, and has a cool interface (once you get used to it) for switching from one setup to another easily. The drawback is there are some weird things in the firmware that could be fixed, and the on board effects are what they are--there probably won't ever be a firmware update. And using them is a little wonky; you can't run two different effects on two different channels at the same time the way you can with other mixers (so you can fade out of one song on say a reverb while filtering the next song in for example). But if you're using Traktor you have multiple effects available to you there anyway.
The Korg Zero 4 you mention is a fantastic mixer with a lot of very cool features - including on board effects that can be controlled via the extra EQ knobs, giving you great mixing options (like running the filters the way you can in the DB4's EQ section), but people have had problems with the sound card.
Both the Zero4 and the Evo5 have firewire rather than USB, so it sometimes takes a bit to get things working right on the computer end, depending on your hardware. I thought there was something wrong with my Evo5 for a while before I figured out it was a messed up firewire port that was causing the trouble. I've heard of problems with Zero4 owners using Macs, but they also seem to get them sorted after some googling.
The Denon mixer mentioned DNX1600 is also really good and a better bargain than the Evo. I did own the next mixer up, a DNX-1700, for a couple months and it was terrific - really great sound, very solid hardware, and wonderful features. The on-board effects are not nearly as nice as those in the Evo (or in the Allen and Heath mixers) but better and less heavy handed than Pioneer in my opinion. Like the Evo, the Denon won't be updated either so what you get is what you get. The 1700 has some other nice features like color coded lights to let you know what's going on.
"Art is what you can get away with." - Marshall McLuhan
Wow, very nice deal. The CDJs should cover the cost of any MIDI controllers you might replace them with.
VCM100 / X1 / DJM250 / DJM900 / CDJ2000s / Maschine / Audio2+4 / 2i4 / HS8s / TSP 2.6.8
Macbook Air i7-3667U+8GB 10.9 / Win7x64 i5-3570k+24GB
If you are using Mac, then I believe that the audio issues of the Korg Zero 4 tend to disappear, but that Windows users had issues with the ASIO drivers. That being said, I did own the Zero 4 and currently own the DN-X1600 (which I have listed for sale on the Buy & Sell forum if interested). They are both really good mixers, and for what you are looking for I think that the Korg may be a better fit. It has twice the number of midi-mappable knobs and you can configure the knobs to be either giving midi or audio signals on the fly. A great sound card IMHO, and built very well. I think most of the audio issues that I had heard of before were on the Zero 8, it's bigger brother. All that being said, it was actually really nice having it be firewire as you can get 9-6 pin firewire cords which work perfectly for a Macbook Pro newer than 2009. If I remember correctly a 4-6 pin firewire also works (I used to have a Dell before I switched to Mac, also not a lot of audio issues). Being that you play in a band, having the guitar/mic input could also be a real draw. Also this mixer has a LOT more ins/outs than most I see currently (including MIDI in/out).
The DN-X1600 is a great mixer as well, and is built a lot more robustly with bigger, rubberized knobs (rather than the thin plastic ones of the Korg). If you find yourself really cranking on knobs, then this would be a setup which appeals to you. I would say that it's nice to have pretty much the entire mixer MIDI-mappable, including the MIDI knob section which some people really like. It just ended up not fitting the bill for me, and I switched to a Denon DN-MC6000 as I wanted something that had a sound card, was well built, and had a bunch of knobs already.
All this being said, I really liked having both of these mixers. I've taken them both everywhere with me, including Burning Man, and have never had any issue with either. I can't speak for the Ecler, but a lot of folks like both the Evo 4 as well as 5, so they may be also be good fits - I just don't have any experience with either. Hopefully this helps!
VCM100 / X1 / DJM250 / DJM900 / CDJ2000s / Maschine / Audio2+4 / 2i4 / HS8s / TSP 2.6.8
Macbook Air i7-3667U+8GB 10.9 / Win7x64 i5-3570k+24GB
OP got a DJM900 nexus btw... so problem solved
CLUB OF JACKS - RELEASES >>TRAXSOURCE
Club of Jacks are a London based House & Garage production / DJ duo with releases on a number of underground labels including Plastik People Recordings, Blockhead Recordings, Hi Energy!, Pocket Jacks Trax, Soul Revolution Records and their own Club of Jacks imprint.
Yea I did, and Im yet to really get into it but damn that ecler mixer is sweet...
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