THE GOOD
- This thing is suprisingly solid for a $399 controller. The knobs and faders are smooth but not loose, the clip grid buttons have just the right play to them (same as an MPK controller if you've played with one of those). The smaller buttons scattered throughout feel a lot cheaper, but not so bad that I'd expect any issues with them. The whole unit feels solid and well-built, without being very super heavy.
- Works great right out of the box. Didn't even need to crack the manual (is there even one?), just plugged it in and got right to work. Very intuitive, shouldn't take long at all to master.
- The clip button LEDs are just the right brightness, not blinding in the dark, but you can still see them in the sunlight (though they could be a little brighter for sunlight uses).
- The balistics on the knobs is perfect, 1 fully turn of the hardware knob equals one full turn of what ever parameter is assigned to it in the software. No more needing to turn a knob 3 full rotations to get the full range out of a parameter. It's amazing how many companies still can't get this right.
- It has a power cord retention device on the back, so you don't need to worry about the powercord getting ripped out by mistake.
- You've probably seen the red box outlining the clips that are represented by the current hardware selection. The good news is that this is not always red, the box color changes depending on what skin you have selected. IE, for my favorite "Light Blue" skin, the box is dark blue. Aesthetically it looks nicer, but is still very easy to see.
- Dedicated buttons to scroll between effects on each track, as well as toggling clip and effects views.
THE BAD
- By default, I don't see any way to limit the range of the faders to stop at 0dB instead of +6dB without over-riding the ability for the faders to track the onscreen track selection.
- The Clip Stop button LEDs are green, I would have though red would make more sense.
- The 4-way Bank Select and the Shift buttons are in a weird location considering how much you use them. I don't think this is really an ideal DJ controller, so I wish they would have left off the tiny crossfader and put these controls at the bottom where they would be easier to access.
- Pan knobs? Does anyone really use these in a performance setting?
- I wish the Track Selection buttons were blue instead of green. There's a lot of green LEDs that can be flashing at once, I think using a different color would help the currently selected track stand out more. As it is, only the solo/cue buttons are blue.
- I haven't figured out how to get that funky initialization or standby LED cycling display that Tom Cosm showed in his unboxing video
In general I can definitely see myself LOVING this controller for live use, though perhaps not DJ use where you need to be tweaking parameters (ie, EQ) on multiple tracks at once. In the studio it's actually come in handy a lot more than I expected, the ability to toggle clip and effects views, as well as selected individual effects is very nice, as are the transport and record quantize buttons. To me though, this is primarily a performance controller, and on that front it flat out excels at what it does. Has me thinking of Live in a whole new way, and I've aready got a new live pa prepped and ready to recorded as a result. For the first time in awhile I'm actually looking forward to doing a laptop based live set again.
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