My knee-jerk reaction? Sounds like a crusty old fart who doesn’t like all the new competition coming on stream. haha
BUT… In the interest of digging a little deeper into all of this (and mostly because I love talking about gear and marketing/advertising), there could be a case made that over the last 5 to 8 years or so the majority of new product has been released in the low to mid budget range, and we haven’t seen a whole lot of innovation at the top end of the spectrum.
Clearly the new Prime series shook that up - which is obvious by the response to them. I think the new Rane battle line will have a similar effect.
But before those two new product lines we got a lot of controllers. And most of them were not geared to the high end market. I mean I get it, DJ gear traditionally appealed to pretty narrow market, so companies suddenly having a route to sell a bunch of low-cost, high-profit margin gear to newbies - that was hard to resist. But with everyone chasing that bone the professional / high-end side of the spectrum did get ignored.
One company in particular did see a bigger picture and tied their low and high-end gear into a common ecosystem (I think we all know who I’m talking about here) but even they didn’t really do a lot of innovating at the top end. They just roped everyone into their platform and convinced them to spend all their money on pretty dated technology.
Looking at the inMusic banners and how positioning seems to be shaping up, I think there is an amazing amount of potential. Rane is shaping up to be a leader in the battle / competition / turntablist scene. Denon is making a serious play to be a leader in the club scene. We haven’t seen a pile of new gear from Numark, but I could see this easily gravitate to be the introductory and mid-rage gear, and of course Akai hits the mark for the music production scene.
Of course, the risk of spreading your products across multiple banners like that is how do you tie it all together? Software could be key there. If we start seeing Engine working with Rane gear, and with Numark gear, then you have a way to hook people into the ecosystem. That is of course assuming you want to do it all in house. You could also continue with the currently strong relationship with outside partners such as Serato giving their users everything from basic beginner gear to absolute top of the line (once Serato for Primes rolls out this will actually be the case).
Okay, enough rambling from me… I’ve drifted off of the original question and into the future of gear. But for the first time in a very long time, I’m actually excited about DJ gear again. And I’m really looking forward to seeing how the whole inMusic team ties everything together.