I know there are a few gripes and grumbles with the players, but these to me are generally tinkering around the margins. Coming from DDJ-SX to the Primes, I’ve never used CDJs in their current guise (had 5000s years ago) and was put in the position of using them on Saturday at a night we run. I could’ve cried as my set practically fell to pieces. All the things that I’ve come to appreciate so quickly with the Denons just don’t exist on the CDJs (2000nxs2), finding tracks was a total bitch, half the tracks that I’d had to pre-load using rekordbox just weren’t there, cueing tracks was a total pain in the arse and winding back to the beginning using the jog wheel resulted in the previous track being loaded up again.
Long and short, couldn’t be happier that I chose the SC5000s over CDJ2000s.
Anyone else had similar experiences, or think the CDJs are better after using both?
A further part as well, you can’t set loops in advance in a simple way, not like with the Denons were you can set a loop, turn it off, then when you hit that point turn it on live, something I’ve done for years in Serato.
Lots of behavior of the CDJs is user-customizable. Most DJs will save their own settings (can be done from within RekordBox) which they load as soon as they put in the USB stick to the players.
That said, there really isn’t a comparison between CDJs and the Prime Series imho. Things like track search on a CDJ have always been nasty and nothing short of a decent size touch screen keyboard or usb-keyboard would change that. If you play a very tight set with everything in proper (mini)playlists and no more than twice the music you’d need with you it can be done. But if you are a mobile DJ and need to search a lot for tracks not in playlists or where you don’t remember where you put them … single-knob turn/push search options just doesn’t work.