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Stanton Final Scratch 2:
I was initially very impressed with the hardware feature set of FS2. The scratch amp has three stereo rca inputs (one of which is an aux input, the other two are used for your turntables), two stereo outputs, two phono thru outputs, headphone out complete with vol knob, XLR and ¼” mic input and even a midi in and midi out port! This unit almost has it all. The main complaint I have about the hardware is the lack of a rca aux output. The headphone output is a total waste of space in my opinion and they should have made this the aux output. The reason this is such a big deal is because as a turntablist you might want to use your scratch amp to record and playback in other audio applications besides Traktor FS. Since the scratch amp uses the standard ASIO driver this is possible, but it becomes difficult b/c you have to share the outputs between audio apps. So what you get is Traktor FS playing out the same output as say Sound Forge. I thought it was great that they included a midi in/out on the scratch amp. This means you can hook up a midi footswitch or some other midi controller and assign midi messages to perform functions in Traktor FS (you can also assign keyboard shortcuts to do functions as well). The hardware connects to your computer via Firewire which offers plenty of throughput (400mbits per second). It also has an extra Firewire input so you can chain other devices to it. The physical size of the scratch amp is pretty large (7.75” x 9.5” x 2.25”) which can make it a pain in the ass if you have to bring it along with computer, turntables, mixer, etc.. It’s just one more thing you have to lug around. Serato’s box is a lot smaller than Stanton’s. You can see that in the picture where it is laying on top of the FS2 hardware. I did run into a serious issue with my scratch amp. However, I must say that I am not sure if this is the case on all scratch amp’s. I performed a simple A to B comparison between an audio signal traveling directly to my mixer and one passing thru the scratch amp’s phono thru output. I slapped on 2 copies of the same record and compared the sound quality to each signal. What I found was NOT good. The scratch amp phono thru signal seems to have lost a considerable amount of high end frequencies compared to the direct turntable signal. It sounds as if there is a decent roll off at around 15kHz. Check the audio here. I reported my findings to Stanton and am currently waiting for a final verdict on this. You can hear what I am describing in this .wav file. It would be interesting to perform the same test on the Rane box, but we didn’t have enough time to. The time code records themselves feel very good. One side has three 5 minute songs. Each of these songs starts over at 0 time, which is useful if you get cue burn. You can just start using track 2 instead of track 1. The other side has one 15 minute song with 1 minute gaps for visual reference. This is explained more in the Serato video clip. SOFTWARE I am a big fan of Native Instruments software design, so it’s no surprise that I am pretty impressed with the FS2 software. The user interface is VERY simple. The entire application only has 2 screens. There is the main screen and then a “Setup” dialog box (which has like 4 tabs on it). You can see this in the series of screen shots I have provided. Having never read the manual, I figured out my way around in about 20 mins. There are some areas that could be improved though. I really like the wav display, but it would be great to be able to resize it and the other frames. It would be even more ideal if you could save off templates for your view settings. Loading songs is a breeze. You can do it multiple ways (ctrl+left arrow or right arrow, right click load, etc…). There is even an iTunes playlist import which is VERY cool. The only problem is that it only imports the playlist from iTunes and not the playlist from your actual iPod. This is a huge problem for me personally, b/c I don’t keep any mp3s on my laptop’s harddrive, only on my iPod. Hopefully Native Instruments will fix this soon. IN USE (SCRATCHING) I was surprised that there is no noticeable latency on our test setup. When you scratch it feels like a real vinyl record. The sound quality is a bit digital, but not anymore so that Serato or Numark. I can perform all of the scratches that I know how to on this thing with relatively no problem. I did however, find one pretty shitty bug. You can see me illustrate this in the FS2 video clip. It is possible to go from a complete stop to a really fast scratch and have FS not be able to react. I have reported this bug and I am sure they will fix this in a future release if not by the time you read this review. Slow drags and power offs sound really good on FS2. I must say though, you do have to configure the rumble filter settings to be just right otherwise this will not be the case. If your settings are not sensitive enough (or your threshold is too high), then slow drags will come in under the radar so to speak. This is b/c slow drags mean less amplitude on your signal. I won’t get into the details b/c it will vary from setup to setup, but suffice it to say you can easily configure your system to do quality power offs and really slow drags (see the video). I really like the fact that FS2 has a keylock feature much like that of the CDX, although not as high quality sounding. There are some present artifacts in their keylock algorithm, but at least they have the feature. I am not sure that Serato even supports this. For those that don’t know, keylock means that the pitch stays “locked” and the tempo changes. See the FS2 video for a demonstration of this concept. You definitely don’t want to scratch when in keylock mode either, b/c you will get a weird unnatural scratch sound. Another bug that I found with FS2 lies in the “continuous play on needle up” feature. This setting was on when you see Xman mess up in the FS2 video (the part where the song keeps playing while he isn’t moving the record). You really have to be careful about this setting, b/c of this type of adverse affect. I had completely forgotten that this was on when we started the review, so that might not really be a bug. However, when I turned the setting back on, on purpose, there was a bug. When I lifted the needle, the song played for a split second, then turned off completely. It did this several times (refer to the FS2 video to see it happen). IN USE (MIXING) I find mixing with TFS to be a breeze. Their explorer interface on the left hand side makes it easy to quickly load songs from just about anywhere (CD, iPod, external harddrive). Beat juggling was a snap too. Obviously, you can instantly have doubles of any single audio file you have. Pretty damn cool! This is something I never really considered or realized until really playing around with both Serato and FS2. You can even set cue points in a song, which you can later jump to. I haven’t really played around with this feature much yet. SUMMARY Overall, I am mostly impressed with the hardware of FS2. However, for me it really sucks that there is no aux rca out. It seems really strange that Stanton opted for a ¼” and 1/8” headphone out complete with volume control versus giving us a set of stereo rca or ¼” outs. I am going to see if there is a way to modify your scratch amp to swap out the headphone out for rca or ¼” outs. It seems easy enough if you know a little about soldering and electronics. The reason this is such a big deal is b/c if you want to use FS2 along with other audio applications (acid, sound forge, ableton live, etc..) then you will want to record from your mixer via the aux in and play from the aux outs to a set of monitors/speakers. The software is very user friendly, but there are still several bugs. I think that this is the only thing that is keeping it back from beating Serato. Stanton’s hardware definitely has more features than Serato. RATING - 8 out of 10 Serato Scratch Live:
I love the fact that the hardware is very small, but this is b/c they left out a lot of things. There is no aux in/outs, no midi and it only has a ¼” mic in. Even if you are JUST using Serato, this should still be of concern to you. How do you record your set? Well, the answer is that you have to have another sound card or record it to tape, minidisc, etc.. The Rane unit uses USB. I am not sure if it’s USB 1 or USB 2 though. The actual box is built like a tank. Very durable! I currently own two Rane TTM56 mixers and I fully trust that this hardware is built to the same high quality standards that all other Rane gear is. It surely seemed like it when I was playing around on it. SOFTWARE I don’t really like the wav display. It’s vertical instead of the standard horizontal (left to right). This means that it has far less screen real estate too. You can’t really see that much except for exactly what is currently playing. I also didn’t really like having a HUGE ass part of the screen for something as insignificant as a record label with a cue marker on it. I mean it looks cool, but it’s a huge waste of space in my opinion. Both Serato and FS2 should allow the user to configure as much as possible on the screen. Let me decide if I want the wav displayed vertically or horizontally and how much of the screen it should take up. User interface customization is an area where both need serious improvement. IN USE (SCRATCHING) I could notice a slightly larger latency with Serato compared to FS2, but this could be due to the laptops we tested on. The bottom line is that the latency wasn’t even enough to really complain about though. I couldn’t get this software to mess up at all with any of my scratches. As a matter of fact, none of us got it to mess up. This leads me to believe that Serato is more stable than FS2 currently. There was one serious problem that we never really figured out how or why it was happening. You can see and hear it demonstrated on the Serato video. When you just have a needle sitting around (ie, not playing at all) that channel on your mixer will play very strange audio hiccups. At first Manils thought it was dust on his needle, then it kept happening. He proposed it may be his needles themselves or even his mixer. This might be the case, but I tend to think it might be that he has his rumble filter settings too sensitive and Serato is having a hard time decyhphering what is time code and what is just noise. Whatever the case, this never happened on FS2 and when it did happen on Serato is was quite loud and very annoying. IN USE (MIXING) I really think the beat matching display (the display next to the vertical wav form that shows clicks on snares and kicks) is a super dope idea. This makes beat matching easy. Not that any of us really need this, but it seemed like a cool wiz bang marketing feature. Manils demonstrated mixing and beat juggling and he seemed to do it with ease. The user interface looks easy to navigate to songs and playlists. I am not sure if it imports iTunes playlists though. Loading a track was super easy (watch the Serato video for more details). SUMMARY Surprisingly enough this app seemed to run fairly stable on Manila’s laptop, which is by no means the latest and greatest. I was definitely impressed by that and the software interface. It seemed a little more fun and simple than Final Scratch and definitely more stable. However, there were some really weird random audio glitches. Some of which were caught on the video. I also don’t like the fact that there are NO aux ins/outs besides the mic and no midi in/out. The more I think about it, the more I realize the mic in on these units is stupid. If you had high quality ¼” or rca aux inputs then you could just use the mixer’s mic input. The scratch amp is just doing the Digtal/Analog and Analog/Digital conversion and transfering bits of info regarding that back and forth to the computer OVER the USB or Firewire interface. The size of a given mp3 or wav file has really nothing to do with it. Actually, it couldn't b/c then your latency would fluctuate based on your file, which DEFINITELY isn't the case. Things like cpu speed, sample rate, bit depth (a/d conversion settings basically) are the things that directly affect latency. Therefore, once you get your latency set, it is set for good. However, the pipe (ie USB/Firewire) that delivers the signal back and forth can most definitely be a bottle neck. Obvioulsy the faster CPU, lower sample rate, lower bit depth and faster interface (ie USB/Firewire) will get you the lowest latency. Here are the interface specs: Another couple of interesting tidbits...the human ear can't really percieve latency that is less than 10ms. Our brains just don't work that quick. Another important factoid about the human ear is that it's frequency range is roughly 20Hz to 20kHz. This is interesting to note, b/c alot of companies will have you believing that 96kHz, 24bit or higher is the ONLY way to go. Nonsense. Your ear can't even percieve this. In recording situations, it will make your filesize much larger and in our case it will make your latency larger for no real benifit. If the human ear can only hear up to 20kHz, then 44.1kHz is PLENTY sufficient for your frequency response setting. If you want higher fidelity, go up to 24 bit depth (and you can dither down to 16 later), but for scratch amp setting purposes...16 bit depth is a fine setting. BTW, digital audio CDs are 16bit, 44.1kHz. I am on the fence as to what is better, FS2 or Serato. I think it might come down to price and what you plan on doing with it. If you plan on recording your sets and doing some cool turntablist things with other apps then you might want to opt for FS2 and hope that they fix some of these bugs I reported. On the other hand, if you want a solid, proven solution and you simply want to mix live at clubs, then you will probably want Serato. RATING - 8 out of 10 Numark CDX:
The unit itself feels almost identical to their TTX turntable. It has a nice hard rubberized side and solid overall feel. This is one of the few units that I think could actually even compete with the Technics 1200 quality. The physical size of this unit is virtually identical to that of a normal turntable. In fact, you can easily fit one into any case you might currently use for your turntables. My biggest problem with the CDX is the fact that it is an entirely separate unit that is the same size as a regular turntable. This means if you wanna play vinyl and CDs, you gotta bring both units. I personally can’t picture myself lugging around 2 of these along with my 2 turntables. That’s just CRAZY! This is sort of a catch-22 though, b/c you need the big platter size for it to feel like a real turntable and that it definitely does. In fact, the CDX has no detectable latency whatsoever. It actually responds the best when compared to real vinyl. It doesn’t exactly feel like real vinyl, b/c you have no tonearm creating drag on the record surface. However, it never skips and b/c there is no tonearm, you don’t have to worry about where you scratch on the record. I am not so crazy about the effects on the unit. Obviously they are pre-fader which means that when you cut off your mixer’s fader, no more effect either. You will be much better suited to use an outboard effects unit such as the Korg Kaos Pad. The bleep and reverse switch is a cool feature for those who can memorize the exact location of curse words in a song. Actually I could see radio deejays using this feature if they know the song they are playing is dirty, but need to quickly edit something out. The brake and startup adjustment knobs are a cool feature, b/c you can easily adjust how long it takes for the motor to start up or stop. The pitch range on this bad boy is a HUGE advantage. How many times have you wanted to mix 2 songs together that were just a bit too much for the Technics +/-8% to handle? It happens to me far too often. The Numark can use 4 different pitch scales (+/-6%, +/-12%, +/-25% and +/-100%). It would have been nice if they employed the Technics standard +/-8% for those of us who are used to that scale. The key lock button is very useful too. And the algorithm it uses seems to sound much better than Stanton’s Final Scratch. I am not sure that Serato even has a key lock feature. If it does, we couldn’t find it. Depending on how you tighten the spindle, the record movement can feel smooth to very stiff. We all obviously prefer the looser feel, so it’s easier to scratch. It is possible to get a faulty CDX unit. I should know, b/c I purchased one in August and it was exhibiting some strange warbling effects when I played a CD. I had to return the unit for a new one which worked fine. You can loop and auto trim the loop based on 1 bar, 2 bar, 3 bar or 4 bar. There are only 2 hot cue points though. This is lame when compared to the Technics and Denon CDJs. I am not sure why they skimped on this. Some other cool features are that is has no ground wire, it has detachable rca cables (easy to replace if one goes out), spdif out and a midi out! Pretty damn cool. I wonder what Numark plans to use the midi out for. That will be interesting to see. SOFTWARE There isn’t much to talk about here. Upgrading the firmware is something that is fairly easy to do. You just download a file from Numark, burn it to CD and load it into your CDX and wala, you have the latest updates. I think it’s cool that they show a bar to indicate where you are in a song in relation to the entire song, but I think it would have been extra cool to also allow for wav display. Maybe allow a user to switch between the two modes. My old Akai DPS 12 multi track recorder could even do this, so I know it’s possible. IN USE (SCRATCHING) In our video demo we are scratching using an audio CD, which works VERY well. There is no noticeable latency at all. It feels really similar to vinyl except that you obviously can’t feel the needle weight/drag. I did find that a bit strange, but you can easily adjust to it. It never skips. Ever. I performed every scratch in my arsenal and it handled it with ease. In fact, the CDX handles scratching the best out of all of the units. Slow drags, power offs, etc.. all sound the best on the CDX. There is one interesting thing to note though, if you are scratching with a mp3 data disc you will encounter some strangeness. For one, it uses a different scratching algorithm, so scratching sounds and feels a lot different than when scratching with an audio CD. Numark may have improved this with new firmware upgrades, but I am not sure. IN USE (MIXING) I find it strange mixing with CDs, b/c it is more difficult to search within a song. I am sooo used to needle dropping that anything else is just weird to me. I think Numark did OK with their search wheel though. I like the fact that you can’t accidentally eject a CD when playing it. It would be a nightmare if they didn’t have that feature. SUMMARY This unit is by far the most stable of the three units tested. The bottom line is that it’s easy to setup (no tinkering with a laptop and a shitload of extra wires). You plug it in and it works. However, you do have to take the extra step of burning every single one of your CDs which means wasted time, plus you still have to carry physical media. Another important note is that CDs are VERY easy to scratch up compared to vinyl. I would be scared that I might scratch a CD and not be able to play it. Keep in mind that you will have to bring CDX’s and turntables if you plan on playing a mixture of digital media with vinyl. For this reason, I wouldn’t use the CDX. RATING - 7 out of 10 Bottom Line/ Overall Summary: In my ideal world, I want to carry less shit. Actually, I am quite certain most of us feel this way. Like the great Mies van der Rohe says, “Less is More”. I don’t believe ANY of these products offer this feature yet. Yes, they all lighten your vinyl load, but shit…for some you have to buy a laptop, bring a scratch amp and tons more cables! If you opt for the more stable Numark CDX, then you have to lug 2 of these bad boys around with you in addition to your turntables!! This is crazy! I can’t believe these companies aren’t seeing the bigger picture. It’s 2005 already! Come on. Ok enough bitching, let me offer up my NickNack ideal solution…. It’s actually a 2 part solution… 1) A mixer that has everything Serato/FS2 has internally. There is no need for phono thru or line outs, b/c all of that would be wired internally. Ideally the interface would be Firewire 800, b/c it’s the fastest hot swappable interface currently out. The mixer itself would have midi in/out/thru on it so you could hook up a midi keyboard or footswitch. It would be absolutely necessary to make standardized audio drivers such as ASIO so that this hardware would be recognized and useable in ANY audio application. It would be extra cool if some of the knobs, faders sent midi signals. 2) The other part of the solution would be a hybrid CD/turntable/dvd player. Let’s face it, we want to play all types of media formats. Limiting us to just vinyl is wack. Limiting us to just CDs is even wacker (in my opinion). I want to scratch DVD audio, DVD video, CD data CDs, vinyl records and the it would be super dope to be able to have FS or Serato loaded on a small footprint device such as an iPod instead of having to lug around a laptop just to play mp3s. My word of advice to these corporations making tools for us deejays is, pay attention to us. Ask us for advice. Put yourself in our shoes. Hire some of us as consultants or even full time employees. At least let us beta test your products. How can you make a product geared towards us and not even know what we want? It’s not a guessing game. Most of these corporations have marketing people sitting in small grey cubicals making up features that they think will help sell the product. They aren’t deejays and certainly aren’t turntablists. If you don’t actually use your own product or have people on your team that do, then how can you ever get ahead and know what the “next” level is? Just my $.02, thanks for reading. NickNack Click for a page: |
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