one thing I don’t understand! in italy there is a female dj who works in a fairly well-known radio! in the live radio she and her colleagues use a prime 4! then when she came as a guest in the club where I play she requested the cdj 2000 nxs 2! my prime did not suit her!
At the end of the day IMO Denon only needs to focus on competing with Pioneer club mixers full stop. Nichy brands like Xone or the boutique brands (Play Differently, all of the rotary guys) have those DJs locked in for a reason. And they’re not going to compete with Rane unless they also change Rane’s product focus, I don’t think they need to make a battle mixer anyway, just make an engine based Rane mixer. Other than for the V10 I’ve not seen many DJs switch out of these other brands, a 92/96 guy is a 92/96 guy, etc, and Denon should not entertain making a 6 channel or 4 band mixer until they can make a world class 4 channel 3 band mixer.
The 900NXS (or whatever replaces it) is what they need to take down, I don’t necessarily agree that the 1800s are lesser mixers to use but they do need better components, better build quality, and reference audio to be considered a better product.
Perhaps Jack O’Donnell should simply buy Allen & Heath from whomever owns it right now without changing a thing about their manufacturing & design prowess… except put me in charge of some new product dev 
I have Ideas for them that could crossover to the rest of InMusic, but current A&H is unresponsive to product ideas or job applications.
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That’s easy. The radio station will have a sponsorship deal with either Denon or an equipment supplier.
Shorty is finishing up on a new club in Manhattan feat. full Prime setup, including the x1850:
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Are there more stages of compression-limiting in the mixer than we knew about? Even if you’re below -10dBFS at every point in the mixer, is it still possibly doing something to the dynamics somewhere? I turn off the master and main FX limiters, btw. This dry, over-damped, lack of air quality it has is like it’s not even running at 16bit dynamic range on the mixer, is being robbed of decay, and is also being pushed through a tiny pin hole. Add to that the sound of the players laced with 100X inter-modulation distortion of original signal and like they’re running at only 32khz for 44.1khz files (-3dB down at about 16khz) and 44.1khz for 96khz files (-3dB down at 20khz), and that’s enough combination of sonic degradation for most people to finally start hearing inadequacies compared to other gear. To me, the whole Prime system with lossless files sounds as bad or worse than playing lossy files on the competition.
It is only a matter of time before the industry as a whole see’s the light and realises the future is Denon, so long as Denon can exceed the competition across all areas not just the hardware.
I can’t even get my 5000’s to stop glitching, let alone worry about the sound quality. Although I still have an x1600 and that thing sounds better, feels better, and has proven to be more reliable than the x1800 (had to send mine back for bricking) and x1850 so far.
Glad @Reticuli did some sound testing, as I’m sure most of us would never have known this information otherwise.
I just know what my local peers think about the current Denon lineup. Most of them are of the opinion that the SC5000 looked like a toy, and the SC6000 remedied that. Just as they also think the X1850 looks like a toy. That “green” has got to go if Denon want to be taken seriously. I know Roland used it, but even looking back, that gear looks toyish as well. No matter how you slice it, Neon Green is tacky AF!! Used sparingly, it’s fine, but not across the whole mixer. Think about why peeps think that Pioneer gear “looks” so good. They use Orange/Amber, Red, Blue, Green, Black, and White all throughout their gear. It’s tasteful. Aesthetically pleasing.
That’s all I was trying to say.
As far as the LINK’d sessions point you made, I disagree. I imagine people would rather mix on anything than mix on the X1850. It’s my opinion, and opinions are like arseholes, so… 
Totally agree!!
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100% agree with this, the Neon Green need to die ! In Paris with my friend I have the same remark, SC5000 look like a little Toy and indeed the SC6000 is lot better and improvement, it’s really hard to sell the SC Line when all the people prefers to buy some XDJ RX ou XDJ 1000 mk2
It’s a fact that the CDJ is more appealing with the look and the color (I’m not talking about the build quality)
Same thing with the UI I really hate this gamer Green, it’s just ugly
Well the plastic toy XDJ1000 owners I know said the same, until they used the SC5000. And then the SC6000 slam dunked. Problem is that their religion is so strong, they still play with the XDJ1000… knowledge of the SC6000 and money blocks them to buy the CDJ3000.
Maybe it’s not about turning Pioneer users, but all about getting new users to DenonDJ. Marketing wise a difficulty, but as an iPhone user I won’t change to Samsung either. My last brand change was old-Nokia to Apple.
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My friend just got two 6000M’s and one of them arrived dead (it wouldn’t turn on), so he had to send it back.
Complete fkn joke.
Maybe, but when Gemini firmware had better sound quality than Engine OS, then admittedly Prime is not doing itself a favor, either. I’d rather recreationally listen to lossy files on other brands than lossless files on Prime. To put things in perspective, the new Denons have more IMD playing lossless files than old gear has playing lossy VBR (!!!) MP3s if we’re comparing keylock off.
By the way, the latest Gemini SDJ thing from them appears to have implemented most of the suggestions I made to them when I was beta testing for them and includes some others, including sampler and very advanced key functions. I never got to touch the SDJ, was supposed to eventually get one (and a bunch of other equipment) for free, and we were still working on the MDJs (for which I only got one free of and it’s always been physically defective even after repair by them), but they have apparently made a massive amount of progress at least on their new all-in-one standalone.
I wouldn’t touch V-Case with a ten-foot pole unless I got some major assurances that they’d radically changed it (the analysis files were greater than 1/10th the size of the audio tracks themselves, so 180GB for 1.3TB of tracks and you couldn’t tell it where to save them… bye, bye RAID 0 SSD C Drive), and I’m 3 for 4 in favor of trash designation on their MDJ hardware (i.e. only 1 out of 4 of my MDJs is not physically defective), but still, InMusic needs to up their game. If Gemini hadn’t kicked me off their beta team, I might never have bought Prime.
Plenty of DOA pioneer CDJs around in the last few years too according to the pioneer FB groups
Nothing offers 100% out-of-the-Box working. There’s no rule through says if something cost more than €xx then it will always work forever and ever lol
Any product can be fully tested thoroughly just minutes before it’s packed to leave the factory but then get thrown about by any of the dozen legs of its journey, thrown/kicked around/dropped by any docker, forklift driver, courier etc. The cardboard and polystyrene chosen by a manufacturer can help protect a product, to a certain degree, but not against every 3rd party courier and eventuality
I think inertiamonster basically reaffirmed my point about this:
“If “peeps” did not use a X1850… the reason is simply that: they needed specific hardware functions that are not available in that class of mixers.” = “Niche brands like Xone or the boutique brands have those DJs locked in for a reason”
TBH, considering both Denon and Pioneer’s quality control went to 
in the last couple of years, the only thing it would make me think twice is why didn’t I make sure equipment is tested before I went there or why it wasn’t delivered to me first for testing.
But you are spot on about impression 
Besides the sound differences, a lot of those choosing some of the boutique stuff just don’t like faders. There’s just something about knobs… Hence the reason swapping the faders and sweep FX knobs would be useful, along with an adjustable deadzone on the sweep FX (whatever it’s assigned to) so that we can get rid of both the inability to center those knobs when they’re doing sweep FX, but also to get some big fader center deadzones when using the faders for the sweep FX. That would attract more of the people who were lured by the DB4’s rotary mode.
As for quality control, all Axis 8 players and PPD 9000 mixers I purchased nearly 20 years ago had various serious manufacturing or design defects (often the same defects). Most recently 2 of 4 SC5000 either showed moderate defects or failed soon after using, and 1 out of 2 SC5000M has a non-catastrophic physical defect. Similarly, 1 out of 2 X1800 I own won’t easily center the sweep FX knobs, though I have apparently gotten very lucky on the internal bottom circuit board grounding issue… knock on wood. Similarly, I have not noticed the problem of gross pitch fluctuations in the first 10 minutes on my Ms that’s apparently related to a power supply converter. Part of my recent experience is just luck, but on a positive note, it does seem InMusic has at least somewhat improved quality control.
However, in contrast, my 4 CDJs and one DJM have never exhibited manufacturing or design defects, and no one I know with old or new Pioneers have ever mentioned anything like that. My hunch is that their forum incidents are outliers, and that, in contrast, what we see on this forum is much more representative. In general, Pioneer DJ’s forum doesn’t have that much activity, anyway, as compared to Denon DJ’s forum. So that’s another positive for InMusic even if their QA still isn’t at Pioneer’s level: better community participation and interaction between company & users. InMusic has also been very easy to deal with on getting service, in my experience, even if perhaps you may need to use it more frequently. I suppose that begs the question, though, would this forum participation be needed if QA was better?
Now that I’ve thought about it a bit, I agree that’s a fair point, and as such concede my position. I guess I’m just a snob, haha. I can’t imagine abandoning my Xone:96 for any other mixer out there at the moment. The X1850 doesn’t appeal to me in the slightest, so perhaps I was doing a little projecting.
My bad.
I mean… gestures at Laidback Luke