Originally Posted by
qyzyx
Continued from above. And you thought I would show you mercy.
Meters - Getting the bad out of the way, starting with the channel meters. They look great, 6 green leds up to +0, 3 yellow up to +10, 1 red for peaking, all labeled as such. Kick the shit out of the S4's pathetic meters. It's a good thing they're such high quality, cause you only get two of em. Both controllers kinda fail on this front. Pick your poison I guess. The mc6000 meters have switch just above to assign them to either both inner channels, both outer channels, or master L/R. Not only that, but when mixing with traktor, they don't function at all, so expect some screenlooking. Bleh.
Mixer - Good news, the built in mixer sounds great, much better than mixing in the box. Plus, you don't even need external sources to use it; you can mix with this legit hardware mixer straight out of Traktor. If you flip a switch on the back, the interface starts converting the separate channels of usb audio to analog before sending each to its respective channel. It's essentially a digital w/ external mixer setup, but everything is right in the controller. Bad news, the sound card only has 4 mono outs (8 probably would've bumped it up to $1000), which means 2 stereo decks with the hardware handling the cueueing. It's the first major downside for me, as this thing is an absolute BEAST when using the built in mixer. Channel meters are active, fully adjustable xfader curve kicks in, any latency when using the mixer section is gone. Make no mistake, the mc6000 works fine as a midi controller with 4 decks running, but with 2 decks, it's the best all in one solution, period. But all hope is not lost, because you can still hook up some cd decks and have traktor giving you audio at the same time. Matrix input on every channel, with 2 line (selectable on all channels) and 2 auxiliary (selectable on 1 and 4) channels. Not sure why you'd buy a midi controller to mix with 4 analogue inputs, but it's possible. TRS booth out with separate volume, eq, assignable to any channel or the master. EQ for each mic input, with ducking and delay as well. XLR and RCA mains, standard shit here (*coughS4cough*), basically everything you'd expect from a $500-$700 mixer, but with filters and efx left to the software.
Transport Controls- 4 hotcue buttons with a switch to toggle the remaining 4 which backlight green rather than orange, though they're labeled as sampler buttons since VDJ has em, and I guess traktor will too pretty soon. To those who haven't used denon gear before, I'll describe the standard Denon button used on pretty much every model they make, including this one: they're hardened rubber, with a definable center that the rest kinda wobbles around to make em easier to press. They'll work no matter what way you hit em, and have a nice solid click, but these are not arcade buttons. Cue point juggling is possible, but don't expect any midi fighter virtuosos to be rockin these. Still, they're more rugged and have a better feel than most, and have a distinct, professional, almost futuristic look, and the rubber diffuses the leds to give a beautiful solid glow. I can't tell you how dope this thing looks in a dark room. Moving on, the jogwheels are amazing...for jogwheels. Smooth as a greased midget, dead on center, high resolution, etc., read the product sheet for specs. The sides have a raised pattern to give better grip, but the top is a little smooth. Thinking about covering em with something for better finger traction. But despite being incredibly well built physically, they're still using midi...and midi sucks balls. For pretty much every controller, midi's slow transfer speed is unnoticeable for every control except the jogwheel, where the heftiest streams of midi commands are being used to control the software's most time sensitive function. I don't scratch, but I know that there's definitely some latency going on here. This is where both lose to the S4, or itch if you prefer Serato, both of which have specialized software to take advantage of much faster protocols. So yeah, scratching on small jogwheels is kinda lame and looks profoundly stupid, but if you're still too cheap to buy some turntables and scratch pro, then go with the S4. You might not be able to scratch (Alright, you can make the wiki wiki sound on it. Hip hop DJs will still laugh at you though.), but beat matching isn't too tough. Even with a good 50-100 ms of jogwheel lag, I can usually get the track to within a quick pitch bend of what I need it to be. Alternatively, there's an auto sync button if you just can't be bothered with all that stuff.
Misc Shit- I didn't know where to put this in relation to the review, but you might want to know anyway:
1. While using the hardware mixer, the up/xfaders, eq knobs and gain knobs all stop sending midi. There's nothing you can do about this, even if say, you're using autogain in Traktor and want to use the gain knobs for something else. But using the software mixer, if you wanted to have dedicated filter knobs on all 4 decks (without using shift + parameter), you could map the gains to do that. I thought about doing this, but I don't trust autogain and don't use 4 decks enough to care.
2. I had the idea of using the deck switch mechanism to also switch switch to FX units 3 and 4. You can't do this, at least not in any way I've discovered. All switching the decks does is change the midi channel, and all 4 decks have unique mappings that only work on their channel. Sadly, both fx sections are linked to Deck A, making them unaffected by channel switching. Looks like you'll have to cough up $1400 for a 4midiloop to get full control of traktor's effects.
3. There's some wasted space for Traktor users right beneath the browse/loading area, I think they're VDJ buttons squatting on my controller. In Traktor, they do absolutely nothing beyond some useless utility functions that you'll never use.
4. Mic EQ and Xfader curve adjust are on the front, which bothers some people. The mc6000 is a shorter (looking at it from the top) than most controllers, so I don't really see these causing space problems. Then again, I wouldn't be happy if I pulled it out and saw a bunch of knobs at the bottom of the bag.
Here are some numbers
Build Quality - 5/5
Sound Quality - 5/5
Versatility - 4/5 (No built in timecode support)
Faders & Knobs - 4/5 (Faders aren't perfect, but they're still quality)
Jogwheels - 5/5
Pricing - 5/5
Final Thoughts-
I have no idea how Denon managed to fit so much into one travel sized package. It looks great, feels great, works great. It's closer to being perfect than any midi controller we've seen so far, and doesn't require a top shelf computer to run. As usual with Denon, you're getting way more than you paid for, who've raised the bar for price and value in a controller. If their marketing hadn't been nonexistant, it could have been a club standard by now. But at this moment, you can be assured that it's the portable, professional and high quality controller that we've been waiting for, and that no one will ever notice.
