Well, I did a straight swap from my Radius 4 to an Xone 96. Really happy with the sound from it. Slightly better than the Radius 4 imho, which lost a little sparkle in the high end. I’m struggling to tell the difference between the Xone 96 and running straight from my DAC. Maybe a slight difference in the bass but I was struggling.
I think for most sound systems you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. Although my hearing could be ■■■■ these days…
Funny that Rigby-Jones didn’t allow a bypass on the Radius 4’s quite dry-sounding isolator, but a channel’s high-pass filter bypasses when its knob is fully left. X18xx mixers have very dry isolators, too, but auto bypass when all a channel’s tone controls are centered. Neat trick. When these isolators are in the path, though, they’re not as lively & shimmery as the Mackie, old Denon DJ, or A&H isolators. Not sure why.
A benefit of the Xone 92 and slightly different 96 tone controls is transparent sound when centered, among the most uncolored I’ve heard from A&H short of DB4 filter tone control mode or Xone 62 with tone controls disabled. Still, original Radius 4 has a very clean circuit path that’s hard to otherwise fault, assuming you don’t dislike the isolator’s sound. The Xone 92 measures slightly better than the 96, but that’s probably simply because the latter has a lot more stuff crammed into it.
Hi StereoTyp,
I too have a DB4, it’s the best mixer I have had so far. I contacted A&H and gave them an idea to some how implement a software on a future dj mixer that would give you an accurate musical key of a track playing through it on the fly so if your playing vinyl on it you could quickly decide what record would be compatible without relying on your ripped vinyl library or ear.
Thanks, that’s very handy to know. I will check that out. My current issue is sorting out my colloscle music library. At the moment everything is alltogether in my database. A lot of the ID3 tags have the wrong genre and some have the wrong BPM. I’m wanting to Make playlists like warm up, peak time etc with different music styles and genres which I can go to quickly when I’m djing to different audiences and choose one that would suit the patrons at a particular time during the night.
I’m originally a oldskool vinyl dj so relied on visual record covers and BPM’s. I find digital djing at home very stressful at the moment till I get my collection simplified and organised I won’t be djing out anywhere.
Update: The app you recommend doesn’t work on newer android devices. Tried a couple others and they are inaccurate.
You’re better off doing key analysis on a player that can buffer the whole track rather than a mixer. We saw what real-time live key detection on the DJM-800 was like: pretty janky.
Regardless, A&H appears to have no interest in firmware updates or successor digital DJ mixer models. There are a couple easy firmware tweaks that would help the DB4, but they don’t care. Last update was for a change in the type of screen used, and otherwise is identical to the one before that. It’s like talking to a wall suggesting they put out updated models, for instance 96bit/96khz DB3 and DB6 with larger numbers of rear channels than are matrixed to the top.
The DB2 and DB4 were just DJ-specific adaptations of the older A&H digital iLive concert sound boards rather than some sort of ground-up design. They are particularly unique, though, because of the in-house fixed-point audio processing’s coding resulting in very low-latency for a digital mixer. Heck, even the exact hardware implementation they use seems treated as proprietary trade secret stuff. Their service manuals for the DB line are extremely sparse like the iLive and new dLive line service manuals: basically tells the tech just which entire boards to order from A&H, rather than the components, circuit diagrams, or anything really more specific.