Quote Originally Posted by pacific808 View Post
*Full disclosure I have a pair of CDJ-2000NXS2 units and a DJM-900NXS2 and have been using them for 2 years now so I might be a bit of a pioneer fanboy I guess*

I have been in the rekordbox realm for about 4 years now so I understand the concern for jumping ship to a new platform. Now that being said I took a trip to Vegas a couple months ago for a DJ conference and was excited to see and feel a full Denon setup. On the opening day of the show room I was able to jump behind the Denon display table which had a X1800 mixer, SC5000 on the left, and SC5000M on the right. I didn't even notice the two different players at first. After asking one of the reps if I could load in my SD card I was able to get it loaded into the SC5000M and I saw a notification saying it was detected.

Now right then I thought I was going to be able to get up and running in under a minute as I have seen some youtube reviews and a few people(whom I won't name drop) claimed the interface was natural and intuitive. I will admit I think the gesture controls are a nice feature but after about 5 minutes I felt like a complete idiot because I couldn't figure out how to load a track and the only rep there was jamming away on the MCX8000 and answering questions from curious conference goers. I really should have read up on the menu navigation.

Now my take on the units is that they work very much like the Pioneer units. Features I think are handy are definitely the dual layer players. The thought of playing on one player takes me back to the days of me jamming the club with a single turntable in Serato. I also think Denon has the edge when it comes to hot cue buttons. I find the layout a bit odd but the fact they fit 8 hot cue buttons on a player is pretty sweet. Also they have a slicer function(really wish pioneer had this even thought I never really learned how to use it)! The one thing I absolutely want Pioneer to add on their next revision is the uninterruptible power supply!

Other than that I wish I knew more about the user interface before I got to touch the units. Now would I suggest someone to jump from Pioneer to Denon? Probably not unless they really got to demo the units. If someone was new to DJ'ing and was looking for a killer single manufacturer setup would I tell them to get SC5000's and XM1800? Not before deciding on whether they want to mix on the X1800 vs the DJM-900nxs(that is a whole different argument there). But if I had someone who grew up on Denon gear and enjoyed their experiences then yes I would tell them the Denon units are probably the best choice for them.
Today's update also allows you to import your entire Rekordbox collection into Engine Prime. :-)