Background
Ecler is an audio equipment manufacturer based in the heart of Barcelona, Spain. The company was started in 1965 and have had a rich line of great products from speakers to mixers (more predominantly in my opinion, the mixers). Recently, Ecler has come out with the EVO 5: a great 5 channel mixer with production capabilities, the Nuo *.0 series: the upgraded versions of the already-great and reputable-on-these-forums Nuo 2,3, and 4, and lastly their newest creation– the Evo 4. The Evo 4 was made to match the likes of the Pioneer DJM-800 and rivals against many other mixers including the Xone:92, Xone:42, DJM-800, etc. I fooled around a lot with the industry standard Pioneer DJM-800 a good but felt that Ecler’s standard of quality was always much higher than that of Pioneer’s, having tried Ecler’s Nuo 4 and 5. Conclusively, after debating a long between the Korg Zero 4, Evo 4, and the DJM-800, I decided to get the Evo 4.

Arrival

I actually wasn’t there for the arrival of the Evo 4 but when I came back to see that my girlfriend picked it up, I was overjoyed. Quickly opening it, I noticed that the packaging inside was very snug, well-packaged, and even had that nice new smell like when you open the door to a new car…only this time it was the beautiful Ecler Evo 4. Inside it contained the mixer, manual, sticker, mixer to USB cable, CD, and two plugs: one for American output and one for European.

First Impressions

Wow, I love this mixer already.

- Nice, fat knobs: this is one thing I really like about Ecler’s mixers and not about Pioneer’s: the FAT knobs. They were easy to grab, FUN to tweak, and had a high quality about it unlike Korg’s Zero 4.
- Beautiful Design: Definitely a very sleek design and very logical; however the knobs for the effects section looked a little bit confusing as to what each does in comparison to the DJM-800 where instead it was obvious as to what does what. Though I figure that’s something to easily get used to. The evo 4 even have clear labels/pictures to show what each knob clearly does anyway.
- Beautiful Readouts/Lights/Screens: Oh man. The two screens on this mixer were absolutely beautiful. It’s like if the original Gameboy went HD: the screen was very clear and easy to read with the blue on blue-blackish readout. The text is big, BPM being the most prevalent, and smaller text was easy to read as well. No confusion here. The volume readouts were also prettier than the Nuo 4 and 5.
- Sound quality: amazing…absolutely amazing. I really can’t attest much to it, but in my opinion it’s WAY better than the DJM-800 and I love the EQ knobs a lot more on this.

Layout…but more specifically the effects section
After plugging everything in, I’m still a bit worried about the knobfest that is the effects section, but after getting my hands on them and twisting around, it almost just came to me. In about 15 minutes of toying around, the mixer had a very intuitive feel and was reminiscent of the Nuo 5 I had once owned. But then I realized, oh wait! I forgot that there were TWO effects sections. Now getting my hands on this concept was daunting, but once again it got very intuitive quickly. Soon enough, my music was being chopped up by flanger/LFO and bitcrusher/phaser combos and wow, was it FUN. I don’t know if I could imagine effects-whoring a real set as much as I did in the past half hour, but I feel that sprinkling my set with dual effects will definitely sound pretty damn awesome.

But getting on, the effects sections are easily spotted as two white strips running on each side of the mixer. they each have dry/wet faders (which is something I liked about the NUO 5), an FX launch button, and FX PFLs. The effects knobs were each assigned as 1. Input for Channel, 2. Type of Effect, 3. Parameter 1, and 4. Paramater 2 (the two knobs I thought I was going to get mixed up by, but quickly found out I was wrong). One of the Parameters was tappable so you could push the button and tap a beat out. At the top below the effects screen, there were two buttons used for recording, playing, and stopping a loop during the Loop Sample effect. Alternatively, these could also be used as tempo-changing buttons like that of the DJM-800 reaching as far as 1:4 and up to 32:1 on the Trans, Flanger, and Phaser effects.

(GAH, sorry, but this is the only picture I could take quickly with my macbook)

The ass-end of the mixer had all the obvious outputs with RCAS galore, not to mention a good efx routing system (like you need it..). a very nice layout there. See for yourself.

The rest of the mixer was very logical and smart. PFL buttons and volume knobs were easy to locate under the EQ section, not to mention they had a solid feel, and the output volume knobs were very easy to spot and take hold of…also a solid feel, like their EQ knobs. Also, I’d like to bring into attention that I liked how the way the PFL to Mix knob worked and to me, is the way I’m most used to mixing music. On one end you get what is PFL and on the other is what’s being played. So by turning it more towards the middle, you get a hybrid of both obviously.

So ya……anyway…The EQ knobs were, as mentioned, very smooth and had the click at the 0 mark which is something I don’t mind. The crossfader and volume faders were like BUTTER. Not to mention, the crossfader was in a good position and not too close inside and not too far from the bottom. Each channel also has A/B assignments to be xfaded into as well. So far, I mean the mixer had a very sturdy, solid feel to it; however if there was one word to describe this mixer, it’s really intuitive, cuz everything was just so easy to understand!

Quality
High. Definitely. I seriously salute this company for their sturdiness. It really does feel like their knobs are solid, even though they’re plastic, as well as the faders. I really actually like the quality of these faders and it was easy to start scratching right away even without the Eternal or Innofader. There’s nothing really to argue here!

More into the effects..((UNFINISHED))
Mostly because I think this is the selling point of this mixer. The effects were quite daunting by itself and packed way more of a punch than any other mixer I’ve tried so far. It has a total of 18 effects including:

High Pass Filer
Low Pass Filter
Band Pass Filter
LFO Filter HP
LFO Filter LP
LFO Filter BP
Sweep
Bit Crusher
Delay/Echo
Ping Pong Delay
Flanger
Phaser
Pitch
Trans
Pan
Reverb
Vocoder
Loop Sampler
(External FX)

…but after mixing and matching, there’s just THAT many more.

But I’ll get into that for another time.

Please allow me to play with my mixer a little more and I’ll get back with a second half of a review.

So far this is mixer is VERY nice!

More pics to come soon.

discussion thread:  here

---