Denon DN-SC 2000 impressions after gig - pros and cons
Some people PM'ed me about my experiences with the SC2000, so here they are.
I had my regular bar gig last night, and as far as the controller is concerned, it was pretty much without any major troubles. I currently use the original tsi file that denon provides, and it has a reputation to be kind of buggy, so some of the small glitches I had might be connected to that.
One issue: The first time the jog wheel is being used on each deck in Traktor, the position kind of jumps forward, about half a beat or so. After this happens once, it does not happen again.
Cue point lights occasionally don't reflect the actual cue points. Sometimes they light up even if there is no corresponding cue point in the track. This is connected to the Denon .tsi, I read about it before.
I did not have any traktor freezes or the like. Some people report that they do, and as soon as they disconnect the SC2000, traktor continues to work normally. I do use Traktor Scratch Pro 1.2.7 on a mac, so maybe it is certain computer/driver/hardware combo that lets others run into trouble?
Sometimes, the pitch kind of fluctuates a little, around 0.01 or 0.02 BPM. It seems like the pitch fader value sometimes is stuck between two values and jumps up and down. Does not really make any audible difference, but it can be a little annoying. I read on the Denon forums that this is a known issue and that it is supposed to be fixed sometime with a firmware update.
As far as the handling goes, I kind of imagined the controller might be a bit too small, but this actually was not a problem at all. Yes, the pitch fader is VERY close to the jog wheel, but i am left handed, and there's plenty of space on the left side, so I did not have any issues with that. Apart from that, everything is big enough to be handled properly unless you want to do some serious cue point juggling.
Most of the hardware seems to be very solid. The only controls that let it down are the push encoders for FX and browsing. They feel pretty fragile, to be honest, but I guess only time will tell if they last as long as the rest of the controller. The resolution is also quite low, the filter for example cannot really be used without audible steps. I fixed it by setting a lower sensitivity in the controller manager. More turning for full cut, but better sounding.
Something that really bothered me was the height of the controller. It's very slim, so it kind of disappears next to the mixer. My quick on-site fix was to arrange layers of cassette tape covers I found under the bar, stack three of them and tape them together. This actually worked quite well, and I'll probably use that thing the next time i'll be DJing there. But I can't wait for the Denon bag that's supposed to come out sometime, which doubles as a stand, like the one for the NI X1.
All in all, as far as I can tell so far, it seems to be worth the 200 Euros I paid for it. It does the job really well and I had a lot of fun using it so far. It does need some work though. As soon as I have some time to spare, I'll try to dive a little deeper into making a better .tsi file (or maybe even finding one on the interweb), and I really would appreciate it if a firmware update would fix the pitch fader issue, even though it's more of a niggle than a real problem in my opinion.
If there will ever be something like an MKII version of it, I'd really like to have some encoders that feel a little more solid though.
