Primetime is almost upon us and The new SC5000 Prime offer dual layer control - meaning that each player has TWO pairs of audio outputs to feed into a mixer. This means that any DJ need only buy ONE SC5000 unit and they’ll still be able to mix tracks, use one track as a backbeat and scratch a whole different track over the top, or pretty much anything that they could do with two players.
But… what about all you DJs who are keen to move up from midi to standalone technology with two decks… that’ll be four layers/tracks going into a four channel mixer.
How will you have your mixers 4 channels assigned ?
Both layers of the left player onto channel 1 and 2 of the mixer? Then both layers from the right hand player going to channels 3 & 4 on the right of the mixer?
Or
Perhaps both main layers going to the middle channels 2&3 of the mixer, with the 2nd layers of each deck going to the outer mixer channels?
I vote last option, main decks channel 2 & 3, secondary layers channel 1 & 4. So leftplayer channel 2 & 1, right player channel 3 & 4. Potato tomato.
Question remains which outputs to use, analog or digital, I saw that being asked in another thread but its still a bit unclear to me what’s best… Or what to use in what situation…
And if there is option to load in say player B layer 1 while browsing tracks in another player, given that the deck you want to load it in/to is not playing of course…
if you have a mixer with digital inputs then of course use them. otherwise you’d have additional ad/da conversions along the way for no reason.
as to the order, for me the choice is always straight. the first layer of the left deck goes to the left most channel of the mixer. second layer goes to the next channel, first layer of the right deck goes to chan 3 and so on
3,1,2,4 for me - with a lot of switching back and forth between controllers and my X1600 over the past few years it’s just the pattern I’ve gotten used to. Centre two channels for the main mix, outer two channels for the extras.
I don’t foresee this changing once the new players arrive - but never opposed to changing my work flow either if something else makes more sense.
I’ve had this order since the DJM-600 due to the limited phono inputs.
Back then, turntables were my main mix and I had CD players to compliment the mix.
Times change…
I’d probably keep it identical as to the setup I’ve always used where 2 & 3 were reserved for the “main” players with and 1 and 4 used as secondary players for sampling and such. Though with all of the endless creative possibilities, I’ll probably try experimenting with manipulating the crossfader assignments on the fly or perhaps assign multiple channels to the crossfader.
Great question. I’m interested to hear others’ takes.
Laidback Luke has an interesting ‘Prime’ (3+1) configuration (which quite possibly could become a new paradigm/norm for future set-ups). He has 2 x SC5000 players to the right of his X1800 mixer - both these are utilised for a single-layer playback only (locked out so the units don’t even access Layer ‘B’). His single SC5000 player on the left of his mixer is the one he uses for dual-layer playback (Layers A&B). I’ll dig deeper and see if I can get more info on how he configures his audio routing into the X1800 Prime, and report back if/when I do… Should be interesting to note how Luke does this though eh?!
Surely interesting to hear how LBL is wired! And how he organises his tracks to keep track of them all.
On the routing I figure he uses analog outputs for the left player and digitals for the two(=4) on the right… Or the otherway around, but in theory you should be able to connect 8 players on four analog and four digital inputs on the mixer. And two laptops with four virtual decks each. So with one mixer you can play four streams of 16 possible audio inputs at one time, right? And as you said earlier record them al seperatly ànd integrally from master out… Just seven more days of waiting!
Could it be possible to put the master out in mono, so one can play dual layers/two sources thru one channel simultaneously? Talking about mashing on the fly… So you can have a beatloop on layer A and hussle cues slice and rolls on layer B effectively acting like a remix deck… So much awesome.
