I don’t like the Pioneer jog bend deadzone and the combination of a lack of pitch ranges between 16% & 100% and only 0.5% increments on 100%. I own 4 CDJ-900s and they have difficulty seeing the music inside some folders, too.
I also own 12 Hanpins (all ADJ now, though I used to have Stanton and DJ Tech, too), but their DSP sound quality is inferior to the Pioneers as well as the browsing being difficult to find your music on them with only the lowest folders with music showing. Fast loading and no control latency, but hard to navigate. I still use them a lot, but it’s a pain finding the tracks I want and other people basically refuse to use them for that reason. The latest Hanpin (Reloop RMP-4) actually improved the sound quality of the processing and fixed the jog as I instructed them, but stupidly got rid of the SPDIF output to make room for frigg’n sync (!!!) and didn’t go to a larger screen. That was discontinued after about a year of being on the market. So the only game in town to get a standalone unit with good browsing, link, lots of pitch ranges, good pitch increments, and no jog bend deadzone was literally Denon Prime.
As for sticking to vinyl, I have 8 super OEM TTs and maybe only a thousand records. I keep some of them where I play. I love vinyl. Tracks tend to be mastered more dynamically. I’m an expert at setting TTs up after all these years. 12" is fun to work with. It’s how I started. But records are expensive now like never before, wear out, heavy, and I have like nearly 100,000 digital audio tracks. Need digital playback.
Oh, I own the Denon 5500s, too, but with the motor off it has a jog bend deadzone and with motor on it has issues registering platter drags. TT Tricks setting On they completely ignore the platter, and Off only occasionally/briefly sees manipulation of the platter. So goofy platter bend registering with motor on.
Bending on the 5500 7" record or disc itself is fun and useful to practice on, especially since Super OEM TTs are so high torque you really have to nudge and friction the record directly on those, anyway, but the 5500 is nightmare to actually play on live in a venue… partly because of the touchy 7" and inconsistent platter registering, but also because of strange stuff like you can’t set the hot starts with your hand holding the record/disk. Truly bizarre. The sound on the 5500 is comparable to the CDJ-900, though.
I have Deckadance 1&2, Torq 2.0. Traktor, Virtual DJ, and Mixxx. Of all of them, I mostly only use VDJ now when I have a computer and mostly just when I’m too tired to stand or am sick or something or need to build some special set for an event in another town. Occasionally if I need to do an event with requests or music I don’t know at all, I will do a controller setup, either with the Pioneers or Hanpins.
As for my weird needs to hide on screen stuff I don’t want, I can do that with Traktor and VDJ easily. I also tutor and mentor DJs, though, and it would be extremely useful to have decks other people can immediately jump on and use, browse naturally to find their tracks, have good analog-like interface (not possible on Pioneer currently with them ignoring both slow jog bends and small pitch fader movements), and force them to use their ears. I would probably also lock that garbage out with visiting DJs or open deck nights, because, frankly, I find watching people DJ with their eyes to be BORING and I don’t get paid enough to be bored while watching other people DJ at events I run.
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