The growing market of digital music is called to rewrite the rules of that fat part of the show-business tighlty bound to the music industry, threatening the foundations of the production and distribution structures. In Italy the digital market has increased around 101% his volume, while the production and distribution secotrs lost the 4.9%. The known habits and imagery of the youth culture about music listening are changing radically and very fast, creating troubles in tracing the new market trends connected to this dimension. How does this fit in a review about a midi-usb controller? Actually the Vestax VCI-100, is one of the many new upcoming hardware devices which let us forsee what’s next. Less and less vinyls in the shops and tons of digitl music and dedicated hardware all around. The digital consolles are nomore toys for late Djs, but precise and intuitive tools, free from any edipic complex towards the vinyl and its digitalised imitations. Finally the time has come for smart pieces of hardware, to be proudly part of any club equipment, together with affardable and powerful laptops. The Vestax VCI-100, provided by a professional quality mixer, is equipped with controls and jog-wheels already familiar in the cd consolles. The thing is pretty handy and solid, and the interface is quite friendly for the ones used to more traditional mixing devices. This controller is already tested to be used with the main applications within this sector (Traktor, MixVibes, Deckadance, Torq, PCDJ ed Ableton), showing real quality. With more then 90 different instances controlled via USB, it supports almost the totality of Traktor controls (already present in bundle), and gives the chance to adjust the sensitivity of the jog-wheel and volume curve of the crossfader. The real experts in the art of mixing will take around one ‘long’ hour to fully understand all the functionalities of the device. The newbies, unaware of any technique, will do crap anyway, despite of the automatic bpm sinc, excellent pre-listening and the complete cut of the middle-low frequencies. Very simple and intuitive is also the configuration part, latency calculation and all the stuff to make it work properly. It goes without saying that a professional usage implies an external sound card. Lots of variety also here, for any guy’s pocket, just be careful to electric implications with powerful sound systems, often generating unpleasant back noises, but easily avoidable with some Ground loop Isolators. The digital turn makes happy also my poor back, fed up with heavy flightcases to carry around the world :-). Even if turntablism will remain the fundamental part of the history of djing and of the vinyl anyway (VCI-100, after all, is not a scratch-machine) a professional dj-set is quite a reachable goal thanks to this wonderful product, which satisfies easily any need.
more info:
http://www.vestax.com/v/products/players/vci100.html and http://www.newgroove.it
