Need some input on people who have experience on both platforms. I currently have xdj1000mk2s and a djm750mk2. I want another 2 decks and debating which I should go with.
On paper I absolutely love what the denons have to offer.. I’ve yet to play with them myself though. One big thing I’d like to know more about is the conversion of rekordbox playlists and whatnot. I know it has the capability but does that also generate regular call cues (not just hot cues).
I’ve also read some issues with lower bpm stuff? Not sure how true that is, but I do work with 95-100 bpm glitch hop and moombahton.. would this be an issue? But for the most part I’m 120-170 bpm (house all the way to dnb and uk hardcore).
I’ve played on 2000s plenty enough, and feature wise isn’t too different than what I already have… But the look and feel of them is just absolutely amazing. Ive grown very attached to the mechanical jog wheels… they feel second nature now. Not sure how I’ll like the feel of the capacitive jog wheel of the sc5000? might just have to go to a guitar center and get a feel of the sc5000s. Can get that whole prime setup for less than 2 2000s.
Some unbiased honest opinions please! Put any money arguments aside please! And thank you to anyone who inputs.
I was looking to get a 750mk2 and a pair of xdj1000mk2s…but after the price drop I’m going for 750mk2 and a pair of SC5000s…4 deck capability, rekordbox compatibility, and a 1/4 of the price of 4 NXS2s or 1/2 the price of 4 XDJ1000mk2s.
if the rekordbox conversion takes a little time, i won’t be worried and i’ll be ready for any player
Well I’ve got a rekordbox library that goes back all the way back to using cdj850s. My currently library is around 300gb of music. Gonna make it a priority to go to my local guitar center to try out these sc5000s. Guess it wouldn’t hurt to have both pioneer and denon setups
Get a full Prime system. It’s not even close. Trust me. You will soon regret it if you make another choice. SPDIF capability. Full integration over ethernet. It’s not like you need a Pioneer mixer to know how to use one. They all basically do the same stuff in the same layout.
I’ve brought one with the intention of doing exactly that. To be honest, using one with the dual layer feature is a bit of a nightmare. You really have to be on the ball, otherwise you end up stopping the wrong deck.
I also find the overviews at the bottom of the display slightly confusing. These switch so the the lower slightly larger waveform is the currently selected deck. …i’d rather this was Always deck A above & deck B below.
I’d like a pair, but not sure I can afford a second one. So i suspect I may end up selling the one I have.
Maybe someone knows a way to put the waveforms as you want or perhaps you can write in the Denon forums and others may support it, which could lead to changes in firmware.. or maybe there’s an option to do it already.
I’ve never used one, but what would sound good is having both waveforms 1 above the other, and the active deck has a bigger waveform and the other one perhaps dimmed, if that makes sense? I guess you know how it already works I’ve only looked at reviews a while back.
One wave for is bigger than the other one, but they do swap places. One helpful tool is changing the deck light colour, whatever colour is round the platter is the deck you’re using. When the channel fader is down it’s a white light instead.
That’s basically what I’m planning whenever I get a pair. I’d love to set the colors so they look good, but it makes a lot more sense to set them to 4 obviously different colors and put stickers on my mixer that match them…so I can glance at the mixer and know which decks/layers are okay to stop. I’m pretty sure there’s an automatic way to do the same thing with a Prime mixer, but I’d rather keep my 2016.
There is, whatever colour you assign to a deck layer shows up above whatever channel you’ve plumbed it into on the Prime mixer. I’m, helpfully, colour blind (mild protanopia) so I have Red/Yellow on the left and Blue/Green on the right. I struggle to tell the difference between the yellow and green lights but they’re channels 1 & 4 on the x1800 so I don’t ever get confused. Yellow/Green on the same deck would result in chaos during a mix
Nice! I had a flatmate who was colour blind and he explained to me how it worked, up til that point I naively thought that everything was black and white and shades of grey.
I think making the long-term investment of the Pioneer Nexus series is a very solid move for a DJ. It gives you the ability to practice on exactly what you’ll see at the club and have a high-quality home DJ setup… these are the players that are used WORLDWIDE. Denon is dope (and in some ways, better than Pioneer) but there’s no doubt Pioneer DJ holds it value across years of use and that’s also something to be considered. I currently have one CDJ-2000NXS2, XDJ-1000, XDJ-1000mk2. I am currently paying off the CDJ-2000NXS2 player and will upgrade the rest of the system as time goes on.
My gosh, I wonder how my entire generation of DJ’s that practiced at home on shitty non-pioneer players managed to use those complicated Pioneer decks at clubs…
This advice is bad in so many ways. Worthy of a thread of it’s own to discuss properly.
If all you’d ever mixed on was vinyl and/or non-Pioneer media players or controllers, I can see jumping on Pioneers with their poor pitch resolution past 16% range, the clunky, unintuitive, and not-analog-like jog bend deadzone, and also lacking features of controller & computer or Denon Prime all being limitations they’d want to become accustomed to.
There’s also those DJs who started with cheats & training wheels and are reliant on BPM counters, moving waveforums, pre-analysis, gridding, and saved cues & loops. Those newbs will probably want to gravitate to the industry standard pre-analysis if they’re going to try and somehow pose their way into DJ booths, otherwise it’s currently just more variables to worry about and more work for them that they can already barely manage. A lot of them don’t even use headphones much, and for some it’s just a fashion accessory.
The ability to do rentals is easier with Pioneer in the short-term before Denon gets more marketshare. Eventually people will probably just buy Denon instead of spending their money repeatedly on renting seemingly-overpriced Pioneer gear, though. I know people have riders to fill, but that’s also why I think the Change Your Rider slogan was a mistake on Prime. It should be Lose The Rider or Free The Rider or something like that. You want the DJ equipment to be off the rider and equipment installed that anyone worth booking can use.
As Denon DJ works out all their bugs, adds even more features & changes, the newbs gain experience, and awareness flows, I think things will change. Well, probably not actually the riders or the slogans at this rate, but I think purchase patterns for both private peeps and eventually clubs will. I anticipate you’ll see movement in a month or two on the former and 6 months or a year to some measurable degree on the latter.
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.
