Kontrol DJ KDJ-500

[Ghazala]

Anyone using this little item?

I am thinking about buying it

[Ronny Pries]

You were looking for opinions?

Well - while it might be technically a good device, i personally think the jogwheels are just a waste of space for controllers you'd have more use for. I just wrote specifically about such controllers on my site..

"In contrary to the controller of my dreams the recent devices slip away further and further by technical design. The bigger the jogwheel, the merrier the marketing efforts. Dear product designers - WHY? In which way do jogwheels improve anything for digital DJ’s?

Most of the ones on midi controllers don’t have a motor on their own thus they don’t spin, that kinda spoils the entire “huh, i’m touching an actual vinyl” experience. Ah - i should use the joghweel to cue through my music like using the shelf on a record? Let’s face it: it’s not that any there would be any mp3s that containing several tracks at once. Apart from that almost every DJ application has a cue marker where it jumps to after loading a file. Even if there are people using let’s say 5 to 10 cue points in a single track skipping between them doesn’t really demand a jogwheel for operation. They’re often even too unprecise to not jump over the point one’s heading to.

What’s left? Scratching! Hands up, how many digital DJ’s actually scratch? Shooting in the dark i’d say maybe 3 out of 100. If you, the product designers would actually like to sell your controller to any of those 3 you’d most probably get the physics of a spinning turntable emulated straight in your product which usually isn’t the case. Using the jogwheel for pitchbend goes into the same category for me. No go.

I employed the touch sensitive pads of my Axiom 61 to take care of pitchbends. They do the job with such a high accuracy and precision i could never reach with my hands on an actual vinyl, not even thinking about the rather sluggish realized lot of jogwheels on midi controllers."

Didn't really have the guts to rephrase above, hope nobody minds me copying from my site



Okay - where to go from here? There's a fair amount of other controllers that cost less money but offer more bang for the buck. It's also a question of what you wanna use the controller for. Maybe you can shed some light on that?!

Cheers,
Ronny