You may find this interesting...

[n2hf1st]

Are you going to stay with beatmatching manually or change to sync? That'll influence your final decision big time.

Manual beatmatching - best choice would probably be a vci-300 w/ itch
Sync - vci-100 w custom tsi + nano pad or xone 1d, or vci-100 se

The top end controllers are, in no particular order, vci-100, vci-300, xone 1d, xone 3d/4d, xone dx w/ itch (not released yet but it's allen and heath, bound to be quality), vcm-100 (for supplimental deck c/d control), x1 (not released yet but looks reasonable), and the korg nano stuff is popular despite being cheap. I might be forgetting a couple but those are the big ones.

[MightySeven]

I'd like to maintain my beatmatching skills really, so I can muck about at friends' parties on their non-laptop kit etc. Having said that, if playing sync lets me do some crazy stuff that would otherwise be impossible, I'd love to play around with that as well. I sort of assumed using sync was frowned on by a lot of people?

There basically isn't an area of DJing that I'm not interested in at least having a muck about with.

[DvlsAdvct]

Using Sync allows you to really screw around with a lot of other stuff. I mean, you get a whole other slew of controls you didn't have before. The only reason I still use it is cause I have to mix off of external decks when spinning live.

[tekki]

I can dig what mighty7s getting at. Got the same thing on my BCR.

It might be a cool idea to look at Stanton's SCS.1d or NS-7... But you're gonna have to bring in the big bucks for that.

[MightySeven]

Haha if I didn't need to eat or pay rent, either of those would be perfect

My basic plan is to try and pick up a Spin when I'm next in the US and see how I like it. If I start bumping up against the limits of functionality of the Spin I might look at upgrading to a VCI-300. If I decide I don't like DJing on a Vestax console I'll start looking elsewhere.

I may have supported DJ Shadow, but I'm by no means a brilliant DJ. I think as a next step the Spin will probably be a sensible (and relatively cheap) option.

That's the plan, but obviously I'd love to hear your thoughts. As you can tell from the videos, I haven't been doing this for long!

[tekki]

Well, what I see is that you have a good starting point. An open mind for any controller, but clear view of what you'd like.

The advice I a,ways tend to give, think about what you'd want to do with the controller. Think about the preferred way of spinning tunes. Design that or make it into a design for a controller and match that design to the current available controllers.
That way you can be more sure that the controller you want to buy, meets your requirements to a controller.

So you're at a good point! Can't wait for you to start off with a Vestax Spin, as that I believe that this is can be an ideal starting controller.