BLOG 16/10/2020
The Jan Diaries — A Solid Alternative to Pioneer CD Players
Almost nobody Jan Kinčl knows owns one, and that is the reason this entry in The Jan Diaries exists. The Pioneer Rekordbox Interface 2 costs around 2,000 kuna, does most of what a DJ needs at home, and sits in a blind spot for colleagues who otherwise keep CD players beside their turntables. The column is a heads-up written the day after the box arrived.
What the piece covers
Kinčl starts by conceding the obvious: Pioneer CD players are excellent machines, and few DJs can honestly argue against the series that has run clubs and festivals for twenty years. He came to them late and reluctantly, then came to appreciate what they allow — one bag with around eighty records plus a USB stick holding everything else, and a loop function that in all its simplicity becomes a remarkably creative tool once you know how to handle it. The objection is not to the machine but to the price and the place. A pair of CDJ 2000NXS2 units runs to about 5,000 euros; even discounted by 5,000 kuna, a single unit lands at 18,000. He also finds them ugly — the lights, the current Pioneer design language — and cannot picture them in a living room next to the plain elegance of a pair of Technics. That money, he argues, belongs in studio gear.
The rental argument gets dismantled too. Expensive players only make sense as a primary playback device or as a rental investment, and rental economics are unstable: a new model appears, DJs write the newer spec into their technical riders, and the gear you bought loses value fast. With club recordings off the table in 2020, what Kinčl needed was a way to fold purchased digital music and his own unreleased material into recordings made at home.
The part that stayed
The answer is DVS, the digital vinyl system: timecode records send a signal into a small interface box, which translates it and tells the computer what to do with the track. The technology is old — Native Instruments Traktor and Rane Serato work the same way — and old enough to be good, since hip-hop battle DJs get enough tactile fidelity out of it to feel no difference. Kinčl has played on both, and his verdict has not moved: a laptop screen in a club does not work for him. At home it is another matter. The Rekordbox Interface 2 puts digital music through the turntables, keeps the more elegant physical manipulation intact, and does it inside Rekordbox, the software everyone already uses to prepare and export music to USB. An hour after unboxing it, he recorded a new mix.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Four minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Solidna alternativa za Pioneer CD playere → redbull.com