After all this discussion about CD's versus Vinyl, I decided to stop by the
local audio equipment store and test out one of these CD mixing units. I
played around with the Pioneer CMX-5000 and I was really surprised how easy
it was to mix with (it was almost _too_ easy, taking away any challenge,
especially with the "Master Tempo" feature which allows you to change the
tempo without changing the pitch - pretty slick though). I didn't really
have a chance to play around with all the features, but this particular
model has an auto mix feature (talk about cheating!), not that I'd ever use
it ;)
I ended up renting the Tascam CD-302, and have been playing around with it
for the past 6 hours.. I was a bit disappointed to find out that it has
problems reading a few of my CDR's (although only one of the readers
encounters difficulty, so maybe it's just a defective unit or something. It
makes me think though, if and when it comes time to buy one of these units,
I'd better be damn sure that it reads all my blanks). I had another problem
with the jog dial and cue'ing selections. For some reason, when I pause a
track and use the jog dial to manually move the laser to point where the
beat first starts, and press cue to mark the point, it ends up putting the
marker a few frames further than where I want it.. I've found this to be
quite annoying, but I've managed to get by with moving the jog dial to a few
frames _before_ the point I want to cue. This type of behavior didn't
happen with the Pioneer CMX-5000. On the plus side, this unit has tons of
features (auto beat/tempo matching, 10 second Sampler, looping option,
master tempo/master pitch, and a bunch of others that I haven't figured out
yet). It's a bit overwhelming, coming from using a pair of 1200's with just
a single pitch control, but I think with a little practice, I'd be able to
get the hang of the loop feature and become the next Fat Boy Slim.
Anyone else have any recommendations for CD mixing units? Is there anything
out there that will read MP3's or CD-RW's?
Adam
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Mar 31 2001 - 07:55:40 CEST