I was a bit anxious about what mixer to take to the gig actually because of the chatter about “sound quality”. I was worried the VOID was going to be reveal any deficiencies if there were.
I b2b the X1800 and S9 at home but that’s just on a active top.
Eventually went with the 1800 and the 5000M.
I played from Serato and USB during the night.
Nothing major to report in my own subjective experience of the sound.
I hope there will be more improvements to sound quality and if Reticuli wants to be the defacto poster boy for this so be it.
There not much about my prime gear that I can complain about and neither anybody else who played with it. I never heard anyone complain about the sound when play.
It’s amazing to see the arguments in this thread so far.
If I can give my five cent to this topic… I have bought as well the 5000m/x1800 deal. Coming from Traktor and vinyl. I have now two mixer a master sound radius rotary mixer and the x1800. And honestly I am happy with both mixer and happy to have the choice. One fully Analogue and warm one a beast and digital. I don’t understand the complains here. Sound is something completely subjective. And I was also a bit scared about the Denon x1800 digital sound… I personally think you can’t compare the Denon x1800 sound with other brands like pioneer or ecler. Denon got here their own signature sound. Another post in this forum describes as beauty and muddy and about this I agree.
Sound can stay at it is. I hope that Denon will be focus more on software prime as well on the player … library management. I would love to see somehow also on the M player a possibility to show the track artwork.
I applaud you. All three points which I agree with so much. As for point 2, if there’s a way that Denon can make any final microscopic improvements to the sound, without pulling too much resource or time from far more important matters, then I wouldn’t say no. But humanly speaking, the sound, as you say, is fine and can stay as it is.
Muddy is certainly not desirable for professional DJ gear.
This is all totally subjective as always but as much as I love my Prime 4, I really dont think the sound should stay as it is. This also goes for any audio unit from any audio brand. Constant improvement should always push the best sonically from the unit and improve features because this is the units basic function. To provide professional audio to people dancing. Getting the basics right is fundamental and sound is the bare minimum thing we should (mostly) agree on. I visit many forums from different manufacturers and the market leaders rarely debate sound like we do here This says to me that there is an issue somewhere.
As said above, each person will see the sound as subjective and this is only my own personal opinion. On an A > B comparison the sound isn’t at £1.5k. I have a controller I just can’t use on XLR output due to how lifeless it sounds, yet on the RCA out it’s not bad at all.
A few DJs often state that the people on the dancefloor don’t notice sound but any gear is purchased for how fun and enjoyable it is for the DJ to use. I work for four to five hours a night, seven nights a week for five months with my DJ gear and it has to sound right to my own ears and not create fatigue. Drop this P4 on RCA out and I can go all night with it… but that’s a workaround. I shouldn’t have to run it into a second mixer when it has it’s own balanced outputs on it.
At the end of the day there is no right or wrong answer. The sound is pretty much perfect for some users yet muddy or harsh to others but our individual circumstances have a big role to play here. Some users are club DJs, some are mobile DJs and some are bedroom DJs. Some bedroom DJs will have never heard their gear played on a finely tuned club system, only through a pair of KRK monitors or a Hi-Fi (possibly by the RCA out). Some mobile or wedding DJs will have only have ever heard their gear plugged into their powered JBL or Mackie sound systems. Some DJs will have used them in a club with various other bits of pro kit in the booth. This is where an A > B comparison can easily be made and this (I feel) is when the sound characteristics can be exposed.
What is flat with no dynamic range to some is nice and warm to others.
It sounds very great already, but if it can be shined even more then I would welcome the firmware.
What is also good about with your post above is that you have said why you wanted to say, once, and just that once. You are not singing how clever you are to use test equipments and see this problem that no-one else can, five times every days lol
I know on the older denon models they use something called “audio curve”. This was made known till after the introduction of timecode cds where a firmware update had to be made to switch it off. Maybe that’s why people back then said denon sounded better than pioneer.
Maybe the audio will never be bit transparent. It doesn’t mean it will sound bad and maybe just by removing the audio artifacts that Reticuli presented should be enough to please everyone.
Sorry for the delay in responding here. As you can imagine we are very busy as we ramp up our preparations for NAMM 2020.
To confirm, we’re always focused on improving and evolving our products. In fact, earlier this year, we made changes that significantly improved the high end frequency response of our SC5000 players. This change was a direct response to the feedback of our community and we were very happy to deliver this improvement.
Currently our engineers and developers are working on more pressing updates and innovations but if the community feels strong enough about the sound quality, we could potentially revisit to see if we can further improve. We regularly review the Feature Request area and consider the most popular requests when planning our firmware/software updates.
If you believe the sound quality needs to be further improved, please visit and vote for the link below. Opening numerous posts and discussing the subject in various areas of the forum won’t help support the argument as much as simply upvoting the original post of the feature request below.
https://community.enginedj.com/t/improve-audio-processing-quality/14092
Thanks again for all of your continued support and feedback!
It’s all very good to read.
The sound from Prime is already excellent. Of course, if someone says Hey ! Who wants a tiny bit better sound then of course some will raise their hands.
It’s like if you said Hey! A 4 mi ute track takes 8 seconds to analyse on the player. Who’d like it to analyse in 7.9 seconds ? Then of course some will raise their hands too
How I will do updates will see if there is some improvement in quality. We just want the sound to be no worse than in previous denon models.
@JWiLL I can ask for a link . Where the sound improvement function is
I don’t know what your problem is with the sound. My set sounds awesome.
I want better fidelity that’s all and better audio processing
Hmm. I can only recommend you try a better sound system and/or better room, and compare Prime to Virtual DJ 7.4 with -6dB headroom setting or the full Pioneer system. Maybe the music you’re playing is either super sparse and minimalist or is already slightly distorted and unnatural-sounding? I think the sound differences are most noticeable on complex passages and on real sounds. Tech trance is complicated enough I can notice it even though it’s not real sounds, for instance. I also suspect most people saying it sounds fine to them either aren’t really comparing it to anything else at all or are comparing it to something else that’s not set up right. I and quite a few others heard the difference. We did tests and found actual substantial, measurable differences. In fact, the easiest way to get something like Traktor to sound as bad as Prime is to slightly crush into a limiter while having the program & audio interface set for a different sample rate than the track’s native rate. Maybe that’s the reference some of you are coming from? When I run open deck nights and let people just bring their controllers & laptops sometimes, I certainly have seen my share of people running laptop & controller systems in sub-optimal ways.
Your Open deck description reminded me of a situation, I had with one of the “PRO” Dj’s.
I was running Denon X1600 with Traktor with wave files not mp3’s, and there was a guy (the pro dj) with his DJM600 and 2 CDJ’s 850 and Beats by Dre headphones… I wanted to use my mixer as a main mixer for that gig to get the best possible quality, He said to me, that he knows all about sound quality… So I need to shut up, and connect politely my mixer in to one of his channels on the djm600…
Well, a bit of offtopic, but also a funny retrospection, as the guy was redlining that old setup and having total overdrive in the bass boosted beats, I was just watching him laughing 
LOL
There are one or two in this forums who insist the same, too often.
The old Denon digital mixers are sweet sounding, but I won’t judge 
I mean, I’ve had people come in with a DJM900NXS2 we put in instead of the house DJM800 who later wanted to pull theirs out halfway through the night when they got smashed off their booty and wanted to go home. I’m hesitant to put someone else’s mixer in as the centerpiece unless it’s really state of the art and I know them personally or they’re the promoter/headliner dude I know will be there the whole time.
As for redlining a DJM-600, I assume you mean he was completely lighting up his meter LEDs, because some of the old Pioneer analog mixers’ meters are all red past 0dBVu. None of these boards actually clip until the top LED or higher. Some old Numarks you couldn’t clip until the meters were so crushed they stopped bouncing. Not saying you didn’t experience a bad sound guy, though. Oh my goodness have I experienced some weird situations with people running the sound at DJ events. No shortage of variety.
Redlining I meant in a way that the meters were totally static. And djm600 has couple of orange leds above zero dB.
Yeah, that’s bad.
Saw this post online
Thought I’d share it here
