quote: | Originally posted by MSZ
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quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
Nope. I wouldn't buy a mixer that was discontinued 2 years before the brand itself went bust. Getting obsolete parts from spaniards is worse than trying to heard cats. |
quote: | Originally posted by Zak McKracken
I had nuo3 some 6-7 years ago before getting xone32. Unfortunately I didn't really like any of the two. It sounded good but it was strange cue and eq imo. I'm very picky about mixers and its really a shame vestax is out of business. I like their layout and the quality seems good. Not like a shitty pioneer, I'm not getting a pioneer again after having djm300, 500 and 600. |
quote: | Originally posted by Zak McKracken
So to summarize:
- vestax and ecler is out of business
- pioneer sucks
- rane too expensive/overkill
- allen & heath looks more and more plastic
- numark, stanton, behringer etc have shit build quality (and shit sound)
What else is there really? |
quote: | Originally posted by MSZ
What are common defects on mixers, especially well-built ones like the ecler line? I've seen old cruddy numarks work great after over 20 years, the only mixers that I've seen had a fucked channel or some defect would be vestax ironically, of course thats just arbitrary. |
quote: | Originally posted by DJ RANN
tbh, the main thing that goes are the faders. Most crossfaders are user replaceable but often the channel (up) faders are not, and the cheaper the mixer the less likely they are replaceable.
On pioneer mixers the pots crackle and go bad after a while. Absolute fucking bitch to replace (i.e. not worth it).
On vestax the PMC range faders will eventually go bad but they're all user replaceable on that range as it was premium. The pots seem to be more robust though. On the cheaper PCV range that was launched later, those faders actually are good for 1m passes as they were conductive plastic. However the really premium mixers from Vestax like the top end PMC's (50, 55, 500, 37, 46, CX etc) will last forver. Built like fucking tanks. The other thing, is that even though vestax is no more, they produced literally tens of thousands of spare parts and many of the mixers used the same parts. Getting faders and pots is easy.
Ecler had fader issues when abused and they are not fun to replace. The part I didn't like about them is that parts at the best of times were not that easy to get. Now the company has gone under that is only going to be harder.
Interesting point you raise though about Numark; it was a different company 20 years ago. In the early 90's the former head of sales and marketing of Stanton, actually bought Numark. He was still a major shareholder of Stanton so it was kind of like Stanton buying Numark, although it was autonomous from the company. Numark had started out quite well built and good quality but in the years that followed the acquisition, numark became more and more a budget brand, basically catering to the low end/entry level market. Some of it was also market pressures - as the DJ thing exploded, competition really amped up and the most lucrative part of the market was selling cheap equipment to people startuing out, especially as Numark couldn't quite compete with the really high end models from Ure, Rane, Vestax etc.
So that's why you'll find really old mixers from Numark that have stood up really well.
The mixers you see fucked from vestax are nearly always the lower end ones which much like Numark, were the ones that were made to cash in on the lower end of the market.
Same thing with Gemini - they used to make mixers that would take an absolute kicking, even their really cheap ones but as time went on they became really disposable.
Allen and Heath don't have many problems - they always used good quality faders and came from a background of live sound and touring so they were built well, but I have seen some random failures with them such are PCB's dying or transformers crapping out. Still it's rare. |
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