Any plans to improve the sound quality?

Gigged at a Spanking new bar. they haven’t bought any dj players yet, but they have a VOID sound system installed.

I brought in the x1800 and 5000m. Oh my days…the sound was gorgeous.

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I and many others don’t disagree with you and good job with your findings as they are useful to all of us.

Are amps or drivers really gonna suffer? Don’t we use distortion as effects also?

What your video shows are unwanted artifacts and yes work should be done to get rid of them.

I would be interesting to see what results would show if playing off just an iPhone or just the line out off a laptop.

It’s rare and practically a cardinal sin to intentionally master music with much ultrasonic distortion present, otherwise real reproduction will be worse than it could have been of the music. Tweeters can actually be fried if it gets loud enough… a similar risk you’d see feeding them unfiltered clipped signals because of those harmonics. The amp & driver overall ability to reproduce the music is at least degraded by its effort to reproduce this stuff. That’s not even getting into the audible band distortion directly mucking up the sound itself already demonstrated on the players, rather this point is just the hardware no longer able to perform as well.

Not sufficiently rolling off the highs prior to conversion stages (AD, DA, or SRC) produces distortion from the “decimation” stage, distortion like aliasing echo, which is what some of this stuff might actually be if there’s insufficient and/or poor quality low-pass filtering in the conversion processes prior to decimation, especially if it’s getting upsampled way up and then back down in real-time, which can vary wildly in implementation. Check out https://src.infinitewave.ca/ for just 96 down to 44.1. If they’re processing in 32bit and bumping back down to 24bit for the SPDIF, there might be a need for dithering, too.

As for testing your iPhone and laptop, just make sure you play wavs these devices can handle. Also consider D/A stages a factor unless you’re going digitally from them. Did you look at the video, though? That’s Traktor 2 digitally first and the SC5000 digitally second. No pitch fader movement. No keylock. Just playing the sweep. Simple task. iPhone should look like Traktor. I know that’s how it also looks from a CDJ. DVD-A players. VDJ 7.4. Foobar, VLC, etc. This is bizarre performance, almost like it’s crudely upsampling to a multiple of 192 and then back down. But on the plus side, the SPDIF and analog outs on Prime do the same thing, so most of this stuff appears to be digital-domain software stuff.

I run SC5000M with X1800. Sounds awesome! I have NO issue whatsoever. Used to run Pioneers. Sounds a little different. Not better or worse just a bit cleaner perhaps. Behringer is perhaps your weakest chain. Not professional gear with lower quality components.

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The DCX is totally transparent to the humain ear so no I don’t think it’s the weakest

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If you’re not hearing the issues with Prime, you might be listening too loud or with too minimalist of music. Try a less extreme volume and some more challenging content.

With keylock off, Pioneer is literally capable of being an optimal transport out the SPDIF… demonstrably.

DCX has a little noticeable high frequency noise compared to signal when at low digital volume levels and slightly more jitter in 96khz than lower rates unless you get it modded, but uses good AKMs and opamps (better than those in DJM800) and otherwise is fine. Used with mp2015 and x1700, it doesn’t degrade them much… Certainly not as much as analog crossovers. There are better processors, but not for the price

Agree for the price you can’t find a better digital crossover

Recently, I wrote a little on the forum about the ugly sound quality of the entire prime series. Users reported my posts as offensive and called me a troll.

I also have sc5000 and x1800 like you, recently also prime 4 because I had to send equipment for service. I think, like you, that the sound is raw, lack of warmth and dynamics.

I look forward to updating all the time

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Well after using them for 2 weekends of gigs I’m going to send it back.

The sound is just not to my liking. I appreciate that there will be a difference between a digital and an analogue mixer, but, for me, the difference is too big. The sound just lacks any warmth and fullness. It sounds like I’m playing stuff over my laptop whereas with my SC2900/Ecler set up, with the same files, it sounded lovely. Play a track like “Love and Affection” by Joan Armatrading and you can hear it. I appreciate that the Behringer isn’t the best, but I wouldn’t consider upgrading whilst the source sound is so poor.

The features of the SC’s are amazing and I love the vinyl, but they’re not enough to overcome the shortcomings of the sound

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You’re sending the whole system back or just the X1800?

Either of you two tried running the X1800 in a lower sample rate mode? Some of the fatiguing high frequency stuff on the X1800 is reduced that way, though this doesn’t resolve the players’ processing inadequacies or completely improve the X1800.

Also interested if you found the Ecler was able to make some of the Prime players’ sound a little more tolerable by being less revealing or anything…?

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Sending the whole lot back. I got the “free mixer” deal so I wouldn’t get any money back if I just back the mixer. Haven’t tried a lower sampling rate.

The Ecler improved things, but it wasn’t perfect. I plugged the 2900 back in and did back to back tracks with speakers and everything else the same and the difference was still noticeable. Sc2900/Ecler vs Full Prime is night and day. With the mixture it was still a difference although less.

I appreciate this isn’t scientific and sound is subjective, but for me personally, the sound of the prime set up has been a massive let down. I had an X1600 for a bit and that was fine with the SC2900.

To those of you who love the Prime sound, feel free to ignore me. We buy gear for what we like so good luck to you. It’s just not for me

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Ok. Keep an eye out or one of us will message you if there’s ever some big updates that drastically improves the players’ and mixer processing sound. The Prime ship will still be sailing 'round to jump back on later. :slight_smile:

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Ta. I’ve been a Denon fan for ages and like Numark too so I certainly don’t have anything against InMusic. Whenever I’ve used their customer service it’s been great too. To me though, it feels the same as the difference between old SAAB and GM-SAAB. Taken a great name and tried to make it competitive and in doing so lost some of what the old stuff had. Not completely, but just the essence. I dunno. I just play music for a few hours twice a week!

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Honnestly guys I don’t think we will see any improvement on the sound quality of the SC5000, I’m really sure we will see the difference only on the SC50000 “MK2” in 2021 or later, none of the forum admin answer our topics about all this ,i gave up :frowning:

It is disgraceful that no denon dj will speak here :frowning:

I don’t know, but I looked at photos of one taken apart and it appears to be good hardware in there… TI buses and registers, AKM DAC, AKM SPDIF out, ARM chip, etc. The stuff running on them is firmware. I suspect they haven’t done more on the sound because more people weren’t bringing it up and they were secretly working on the Prime 4.

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Im really hope you’re right mate! In my opinion it’s like the same as Audio GD (chinese DAC brand) good hardware and high end stuff but bad engineering and bad measures : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/review-and-measurements-of-audio-gd-nfb28-28-dac-and-headphone-amp.5147/

If it meant I could have great sound, I’d be happy with single layer, maximum +/- 10% pitch change and 4 performance pads. In fact, if they came out and said “this is hi-fi sound, but we had to lose everything apart from 4 hot cues” I’d probably be happy!

Were any of the problems on the Audio GD the result of digital processing prior to the DAC and analog outputs stages? All I see is a bunch of analog output hardware design issues in that thread. In the case of Prime, most of the problems are still present on SPDIFs. That makes it a 1s and 0s thing, and in the case of the possible slight improvement on the analog outs of the players compared to the SPDIFs (hard to be certain it’s real or if analog mixers are just covering over sonic flaws), even this could be a 1s and 0s thing from SRC way up and then back down to the SPDIF that, again, firmware ought to resolve. The only hardware causes I can think of that would result in bad 1s and 0s (or the timing of them) would be the use of very poorly-filtered or wrong type of PWM switching power supplies or crummy clock chips… seems unlikely. Even Benchmark uses switching PSs now and even average clock chips have pretty decent performance. This is not the first digital mixer Denon DJ or InMusic/Numark have ever produced. Old Denon DJ literally produced some of the greatest DJ mixers ever made and Numark created the first 24bit DJ mixers, including the first full digital in and digital out 24bit DJ mixer that still holds its own.

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On the P4 the XLR outputs aren’t a pretty sound for me. The sound is hollow and lacks dynamic range but hook it all up via the RCAs and the improvement is instantly noticed. It’s been said on here why and for that reason I’m only going forward with the RCAs into another Pioneer DJ mixer.