This may be the first year that finally brings a MIDI controller aimed at DJs that tempts me to buy one. Or at least that’s what I keep thinking, year after year. They’re finally catching up to instrument-style MIDI controllers in terms of features and functionality. For a long time now, the thing constantly holding me back has been the simple fact that they don’t offer enough benefit to be worth buying and hauling around another expensive piece of gear. DJ controllers have been trying to look like little more than two-channel DJ mixers for ages. I don’t want or need to replace the mixer. I defy you to show me a decent DJ booth anywhere in the world that doesn’t have a mixer for the DJ to use! What professional DJ would rather play on a MIDI controller than a high-end club mixer? I think it’s great to have the controls there when you’re previewing or noodling at home, or perhaps to test ideas on the road before a gig, but mixer controls alone are not enough to make a DJ controller worth the cost and hassle.

The hardware decision that’s forever a thorn in the side of digital DJs is the audio interface. Unlike a controller, you can’t DJ without an audio interface. Virtually every piece of DJing software on the market supports vinyl control now. Many programs offer support for your choice of brand for both control vinyl and audio interface. As a long-time moderator of the forum for such a piece of software, I can say with confidence that vinyl control is one of, if not THE most important feature to a vast majority of current and potential users. In order to make vinyl control possible, the phono signal from an analog turntable has to be boosted to line level for the computer to make robust use of the timecode coming from the control records. This information shouldn’t exactly be news to anyone involved with the DJ industry. It’s been that way since the beginning of software DJing, yet there are still mind-bogglingly few decent audio interfaces that feature built-in phono preamps. The Native Instruments Audio 8 and RME’s RPM are the only two arguably “pro” DJ interfaces out there, but the RPM requires external power and a PCMCIA slot, which modern laptops are built without. Rane offers the SL-1, but that barely functions as an ASIO interface, the phono preamps aren’t RIAA so they can’t be used with anything but Serato Scratch Live, and CoreAudio drivers for mac aren’t even planned. There’s the notoriously flakey ESI U46DJ, and finally the M-audio Conectiv in the “prosumer” realm, and right now they’re looking like the best choices many people can make. Once you’ve made this choice between the limited options for an interface that’s probably not quite ideal, you are still left without a controller.

Start hauling around (in addition to your laptop and music drives) a controller for helping you cue tracks or control effects, external phono preamps and their respective power cables. It’s hard to find a backpack big enough to carry the gear with which you’re trying to replace what’s starting to look like a pretty portable little record bag you used to haul to gigs.

Enter the latest round of DJ controllers. Vestax seems to have paid at least a small bit of attention to digital DJs last year, because they put audio I/O on their DJ controllers starting with the VCM-100, but once again it falls disappointingly, yet predictably short of greatness, as it comes with NO PHONO PREAMPS! It’s far more compact than the growing number of toy-like, mixer-emulating controllers out there, and the loose jogwheels of its predecessor the VCI-100 wouldn’t be missed on the VCM, IF you could use vinyl to control your software, but unfortunately neither one will be an option to you if you pick up the VCM. There’s a ton of hype surrounding the upcoming VCI-300, but it offers the same limitations I’ve been discussing. The fact I find even more baffling is that the VCI-300 is packaged as the user interface for Serato ITCH. The same company that brought the industry’s most stable but feature deficient DJ software, requiring their proprietary audio interface and a pair of turntables or CD decks to use it, now offers a similar product that’s equally limiting in the other direction.

I don’t understand how or why the manufacturers out there have stayed so consistently deaf to the wants and needs of pro DJs who comprise or are attempting to enter the digital DJ realm. I have literally discussed this issue for years now, with many, many DJs. The list of features on the perfect solution for so many of us is always the same: Give us 4 analog inputs (2 x stereo pairs), switchable between line and phono level, 4 outputs so we can use a decent external mixer, some form of pitch control for situations when vinyl control isn’t possible or practical, make it bus powered, and put it in a compact, portable form-factor. If you want to add a bunch of mixer and effect controls on top of that, great. Everything else is gravy at that point.

Has this truly not occurred to the makers of DJ equipment yet? Are they really this unknowledgeable about the industry to which they are trying to market, or are they simply too busy trying to tell us what we want to use? One of these years, surely ONE of them will get it right.

C