One of few legitimate criticisms I see online of current Denon gear is reliability. A friend wore out several channel faders on his x1800 within a year, and purchased an x1850. I replaced the faders in his x1800, now the faders in the x1850 are acting up in less than a year.
DJs get carried away hammering away on them and they experience so much abuse.
Ideally the channel faders would be more rugged, and be easily replaceable in the same manner as the cross fader without requiring complete disassembly and soldering.
Agreed. It’s weird to me that in 2021, we still have club layout mixers with soldered-in input faders. It’s one of the main reasons I advise against purchasing X1800/1850’s.
I still have my X1700 and it’s faders are still solid and the mixer sounds great. The build quality was never better than when Denon & some of the A&H team had merged for that series of mixers (X1700 & X1600).
I don’t intend for this to be an analog vs debate. I do intend with prejudice to make it into a quality debate.
The pics are to show what quality and user friendly ease of maintenance looks like.
If you look inside those mixers you mentioned you will see more wafer than components and put together in a way that makes it hard to access anything or replace anything.
But forget that I mentioned analog and let’s look a digital.
You right about what seems to be degraded quality of something called a flagship and if I was laidback Luke I wouldn’t be so laidback in pushing for something a little more up there.
No debate on which mixer is easier to repair 🧑‍🔧
Maybe voiding warranties perhaps?
In the xone23c manual you get instructions on how to open up your mixer and make adjustments.
The world of DJ mixers has spiralled into a planned obsolescence rabbit hole. You spend +$2000 on a mixer to have glaring omissions. You would expect high priced 2ch battle mixers to have at least send/returns but instead you get high priced button boxes. You would expect flagship high priced 4ch club mixers with send/returns to handle samplers but they can’t. You have to hit the niche markets for that.
When the cost of a mixer repair by an authorized technician comes close to the cost of manufacturing the unit then your in the wrong business.
I wish there was a 2+2 version of the xone 96.
If anybody here is from Canada and has old broken mixers like a rane empath or something from allen&heath. Give me a shout.
Xone 96 is also having manual on how to open it up and adjust some stuff.
I wish for a denon mixer like Xone 96/DJMV10 in one…
Or a DB4 like would also be a killer, but also with send/returns, at least 2 sends and 2 returns…
Lets be clear here: it’s not because they want you to service your mixer, it’s because they were too cheap to put a source select switch so you can switch phono inputs to line.
Otherwise, agree on all points. Gone are the days of Alps studio-quality faders, audiophile preamps and service manuals online for DJ mixers.
I guess you’re right about them going cheap about phono line switching but the instructions for adjustments and I did say adjustments are for pre/ post eq routing for USB sound card.
As for servicing I think the 23c was not the best example to use other than if you were to open a denon mixer like that you would void the warranty.
If you were to look inside a xone 92/96/4D ect… you will see that everything inside is in pieces that you can easily swap out if something goes bad. A&H have a good philosophy on mixer building.
That’s why I love my Xone92… not only replace parts… just cleaning faders it’s very easy. I do every year and works like first day. Best buy in years.
In addition to making them easily replaceable, I would advocate the use of something like a hall effect sensor, rather than a traditional potentiometer for channel faders.
It looks like someone owns the patent on a linear hall effect sensor and I don’t see any commercially available, but maybe this would be cheap to license and build?
Also if they were built out of something like titanium, that would be great.
