Equipment

My first setup was a pair of Numark Axis 4 CD Players plus a Numark DM3050 3-channel mixer. Not the best of setups to start off with but it was all I could afford at the time and did the job early on really.

In March 2007, I upgraded my CD players to Stanton C.314‘s, which host a load of different features for the price such as hot cues, sampling and effects. My criticism with these though was their reliability (buttons began to ‘stick’ and wouldn’t work) and build quality (buttons wouldn’t work always, other people also had reliability issues in clubs).

I also upgraded my mixer to a Vestax VMC-002-XL, a mixer I enjoyed using. Much smoother upfaders than the Numark and better EQ’s.

One of the upfaders then broke, or I broke it! I repaired it but sold it and used a cheap American Audio QD-6 3-channel mixer for a few months, I needed one as I then bought a Stanton T.60 vinyl turntable – I thought it was about time I learned with vinyl at last!

My Stanton’s were then sold, my American Audio QD-6 isn’t in use and is not picking up too much dust I hope. I then bought a pair of Denon DNS-1200 cd players and a Pioneer DJM-400 Mixer.  Both a big improvement on what I had before. My only slight criticisms though is that the Denon’s aren’t very reliable when using CD’s, sometimes they just froze. Even with updated firmware it still happens. 99% of the time though I use USB drives which is the main reason I bought them. The Pioneer mixer is obviously quite superb with the effects and high quality faders and EQ, but the cueing methods are limited. You can’t crossfade between the 2 channels.