I get it. There’s all kinds of features others fret over that I couldn’t care less about as well. That’s the beauty of choices and the differences between DJs and how they program.
You already have a custom Carmen and an MP2015 but are jonesing for stuff on the Euphonia? Get an EFX-1000 and then head over to Big Noise MPC for their transformers.
https://www.ebay.com/str/bignoisempc
If you’re into faders, too, the X18xx mixers do isolators, and so do the X1700 & Mackie d.4.
Haha, yep. What can I say? I’m a gear whore lol. Love collecting all kinds of quality stuff, and the Euphonia has my attention too if/when they address a few things. Kudos to them for coming out with a strong first offering though. Looking forward to seeing what they may do in future.
The main iso is non-bypassable, so they went with a 3rd-order for less group delay, and yes, the tone controls on it are traditional (fixed) parametric EQs rather than a crossover. More transparent channels that way. Then again, people are buying the Euphonia for the coloration, so maybe they should have loaded it with 24dB/octave isolators throughout to give it that disco sound.
Oh, and the DB4 has a nice channel isolator mode and a rotary mode. You should check that out.
It would be interesting to know if there is science behind the reasoning why they chose it. Do full kill options impact the sound or how smooth the cuts are?
I had a mess around with it on my Prime 2 earlier (not a great comparison as i dont actually know what the normal goes down to, and i imagine the sound is nowhere near the level of of the Euphonia) and it seemed to brighten up the track with the EQ In the 12 o’clock position when switching from ISO to Normal, like it had more impact at that level than when the EQ knob was killed.
And is there also a difference between full kill on a channel EQ and an actual isolator?
An eq adds phase distortion gradually starting from nothing when centered to increasingly. A full kill on one is a cheat that changes its function at a certain point.
An iso is just a summed crossover filter network. Each tone knob is a trim-gain for a duplicate of the signal sent through filters (high-pass on the high, low-pass on the low, and both on the mids) and causes a constant amount of phase distortion unless there’s an explicit bypass. On the new Denon mixers, this bypass is automatic when all three tone control knobs are centered. For a master iso, this has an effect on the cue/master summing, which is why sometimes a master iso is not present in the headphones.
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I always think with guys like that Engineer who designed the Euphonia, they don’t do things by accident do they. So i imagine the decision taken to only have EQ on the channels was an entirely deliberate one, its hardly a cost cutting measure at that price point so must be some other reasoning.
The Pro Link was removed due to cost cutting and the SPDIF was removed because the head engineer has an ego about the quality of his analog outputs design and thinks he knows more than the sound engineers for nightclubs & festivals with house DSPs. He seems a bit nuts. He also listened to some dumb customers on various other aspects, and if you’ve ever been on the Pioneer DJ forum, you know their average customer is even dumber than the average DJ. That company has done more to dumb down DJing than any other DJ company. Let’s call it the “Grimes Effect”. Alpha Theta is also still going on about this ludicrous notion that the ESS DACs’ “122dB” rating means it has that much headroom, and is therefore essentially impossible to clip. Hah hah. “We use floating point!” Yeah, so does 99% of all other digital DJ mixers ever made.
Wouldn’t both of those be removed as the mixer is geared more towards people using turntables etc? And tbh he likely does know far more than your average ‘sound engineer’ at the local nightclub… ive been around the scene long enough to know that the actual talent in that space is few and far between, and reserved to high end super clubs and the like.
It’s a subpar choice for people with turntables. You don’t want MORE distortion added to a turntable signal, which is all the transformer is good for, and the Euphonia has substantial throughput latency compared to even most other digital DJ mixers. Lot of people on the internet noticing it’s not a great match for either vinyl or external effects units. Great for making digital sound less polished, though.
And you know this how? has this been tested? where are you seeing it?
Does anyone in the world actually ever use the digital output on a mixer? ive never seen a single instance of it yet, its always balanced output.
I know what how?
about this latency you’re speaking of. The mixer has only been out 10 minutes.
They admitted there was a latency issue after people complained about it when using external effects units. They hope to improve it, but it’s never going to be even as low as a V10 or A9’s latency due to the fact there’s an extra send-return on it.
That’s down to the effects unit (Specifically Pioneer RMX units) and not the mixer. Mojaxx mentioned it somewhere, he was using an EFX-500 to demo the send/return because those RMX units have an issue.
It’s the mixer. With an external effects unit you’re going through an extra two sets of send-receive DAC-ADC stages even apart from what the effects unit might have. I never heard anything from Mojaxx about it. AT promised to try and improve it, but it will never be at even V10 throughput latency because of the trans loop. Funny thing is, the DB4 has the lowest throughput latency of any digital DJ mixer, but not really a normal send-return effects loop for it. I guess people really upset by it should be using an actual analog mixer.
Watch from 13 minutes on this video… and again its not introducing latency through the mixer itself to the house system, its a send/return loop.
As per the other video i posted up the thread, Louie Vega seems to be managing ok creating super smooth blends with it, almost perfection in fact.
Yep, very curious about that myself. Would love to pick brain of whoever was in charge of the project. Especially curious because of what Reticuli said below regarding “that disco sound”, because it appears the Euphonia was designed with older DJs in mind who are well-versed in that type of mixing, and one of the things we used to do back then long before individual channel isolators started appearing incorporated into mixers is to place individual standalone isolators in-between each turntable and the mixer for complete frequency control over each channel turntable coming into the mixer. Obviously this took up a lot of space and required moving hands away from mixer to reach below each turntable where the isolators were placed (not very efficient to say the least), but it got the job done for removing bass lines of old disco and funk tracks for layering.
The DSP processing adds latency, and every ADC and DAC stage adds more. You can’t get around that with digital, and floating point is particularly bad at it, which is why for the Live-series concert boards A&H developed their proprietary fixed-point firmware.
I remember Morillo used to carry his own Vestax filters around for per-channel filtering back in the day, with duct tape to fasten them in front of the decks.
Im guessing the EQ pots being used in that Condessa of yours are worlds away from anything Pioneer/Alpha would ever install in their own products. It would be good if they explained their decision though.