Yeah, maybe. Or they could have just updated the TTX again. Tonearm could have used some further improvements, and while I wasn’t aware of moisture tolerance issues on any of the line, there you go… another thing to improve. Seems like they threw the TT-200/500/X line baby out with the bathwater when it got a little wet and put a mutant changeling it place.
[quote=“Jay_DenonDJ, post:14, topic:14165, full:true”] Hi @subwax, I’ve reviewed with the product team and they can confirmed the 3 dead zones on the pitch fader which were put in by design to allow for DJs to return to 0 quickly and accurately. [/quote].
Doesn’t matter whether the dead zones are liked, loved or loathed - it’s been confirmed that they are there purposely by design. If there’s no user accessible firmware port then discussing how hateful or how lovely the special zones are is a pointless discussion. All that any such discussion might possibly influence in years to come is IF denon were to make a VL12 mk2 then they might wanna just keep a linear increment and decrement scale on that pitch lin.pot. I seem to remember technics had the same see-saw of lovers and haters when they took out the zero-click detent on their pitch fader on their mk3 or maybe the mk4 SL1200 deck - there was love and anger and a lot of doesn’t matter. But however the VL12 is now, looks like it’s staying exactly that way forever unless there IS a hidden firmware port somewhere.
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I lack confidence in the explanation to Jay from the product dev team on the purpose of the dead zones and how they were arrived upon or ended up in the final product.
The zero-click physical detent on the 1200mk2 is partly because it has no ‘quartz lock’ button. That detent triggers the hard zero lock. The later units that removed it literally have no deadzone near the middle at all and require the adjacent button activated to ever exactly be at zero.
All the ‘super OEM’ Hanpins and the Numark TT-200/500/X line (not to mention some digital player decks) do it the way I previously described the VL12 should: just a little center deadzone and the LED zero light comes on when either in that center deadzone manually or the ‘quartz lock’ button is activated when the fader is out of the deadzone. The Rane Twelve received a returns/repair program by InMusic, and I don’t see why that’s not possible on the VL-12. A substantial number of buyers of it are not even using it for DJing, so that would decrease the number of returns/repairs necessary.
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As long as I know what to look for and there is a dead zone in the middle that’s no issue for me… It seems as if Denon could have eliminated the dead zone the put a center click in the pitch control but I can live with their design methodology…
Beast of a turntable though!!