My Review - Numark NDX400

[ae86touge]

Morning all, I've been using the Numarks daily for a few weeks now and I feel I can write a pretty detailed review about them. It will be a bit wordy and detailed, but when I was looking for reviews and opinions on gear I searched high and low online before parting with my hard earned cash. I rang up decks.co.uk and spoke to a very helpful guy who put this and a Behringer NOX202 (seperate review here) on reserve for a couple of days. So after a 9 hour night shift, I jumped straight in the car at 8am and drove the 5 hour round trip to pick them up! If i'd had them delivered they would have come after Christmas, and I just couldn't wait that long So onto the Cd players, here's a quick bullet point:

Pros

• Well priced
• Solid feel
• Well layed out
• Lots of functions for price
• Easy to use
• Reads CD's/USB fast

Cons

• BPM counter is wildly inaccurate
• No WAV playback
• Small platters for scratching

Aesthetics
They came well packaged and with a well written and easy to read instruction manual and warranty leaflet, and out the box they feel well built and 'meaty'. With all the provided leads plugged in, they were easy to setup and get going. They look good (in my opinion) and light up nicely, the black metal faceplate adds to the quality feel. I once used a pair of Pioneer CDJ400s and they felt a little plasticy compared to these. The buttons feel strong and that they are up to hours and hours of pressing and tapping. If anyone owns or has used a Numark Mixtrack Pro (which i had before this), the buttons are very similar in look and feel. The platter is also similar, however on the NDX400s it feels a lot more solid and rotates nicely, however it doesn't spin freely so anyone who likes to spin back out of tracks may be disapointed. The rotational dial for selecting tracks works well, and pressing it down and rotating it goes through in tens so folders with tonnes of tracks are a breeze to scout through. The pitch slider doesn't feel as solid as others but it does the job and has a nice rubbery feel to it. It moves freely however (and this is me being a bit picky) the notches on the pitch sliders line are blocked by the slider itself, so you find yourself using the notch below the tempo you want as a reference if your matching a track on deck B that you know is the same tempo but deck A is set faster. I hope that makes a shred of sense to anyone! The screen lights up a light blue, and is easy to read. Nothing is too distracting when using the decks in the dark and they do have a good feel to them, they definetly give me confidence in learning on CD's.

Performance
The one downside to these players, and probably the reason a large swathe of customers will look elsewhere, is the lack of WAV playback. As a learner, this doesn't affect me too much as these are strictly bedroom and small party use, where 320 mp3s will suffice. I can see though, as my confidence grows and I start looking for bigger gigs, i'll need to upgrade in order to practice with WAV files i'll use when playing out. Another downside to these players is the auto BPM counter, if you REALLY need the function, use the manual 'Tap' feature. The auto detection is awful, even 4/4 beats are usually inaccurate. It doesn't affect me much as i'm learning to use my ears and not the readout, I could probably put tape over it and be un-phased but if your the sort of person who relies on the BPM readout to beatmatch, look elsewhere. On a more positive note, the players read CD's and the USB sticks really fast. A 4gb stick choc full of tunes takes about 3 seconds to read and the tracks are playable instantly after being selected. Folders are easy to navigate around and I like the way I can be playing a track, press the 'Folder' button then search and hover over the next tune, ready to load up as soon as the first track is mixed out. The platters are a little small, however the scratch function works well and I do enjoy practicing scratching funny voice samples over hip hop beats. The players also have a reverse function which is useful to mix out of the last couple of bars of hip hop tracks when transitioning, and an adjustable brake function but admittedly I don't know how to use it! The pitch can be set at 4%, 8%, 16% or 100%. I'm usually using 4%, maybe 8% if one track is a lot fast than the other. 100% serves no purpose other than a cheap laugh when you speed tracks up full and leave the master tempo off. I have found a couple of tracks (one being Dark Tantrums - The Storm) which sound a little bit clumsy when played maybe 4 BPM slower than usual. Maybe it's just the composition of that track, but the players sound like they are stumbling to put it out smoothly, other than this I've not had any problems with them playing tracks slower of faster than usual.

Conclusion
So to conclude, these players are ideal for a begginer like me as they play tracks, reverse, scratch and with the adjustable pitch range they beatmatch with ease. The BPM counter doesn't work very well at all but that's not an issue as it forces me to use my ears to match instead of relying on the tech, and the platters are a tad small for scratching but if that's what your looking to do, buy a set of 1210s and a stack of break vinyls. As a bedroom DJ learning and doing the odd house party and small gatherings, they do the job well and only when I move onto bigger gigs will I take the plunge and move on up to bigger players. All in all i'd say i'm very happy with my purchase and I hope my review ensures everyone else gets the right gear too!

Thanks for reading, Alex.

[HarryK]

Nice review! My biggest concern with theese is long term performance. Having use Pioneer CDJs, I know how awfully bad they feel. However, even though those Numarks feel better, people have had complaints about their reliability. I'd like to own a pair of these for practising at home, but don't know if it would be a safe investment. Have you had any problems with yours? How long have you had them exactly? Is it only a few weeks as you mentioned? Do you use both CDs and USBs or only one playback method?

[ae86touge]

I bought then December 22nd and have used them for about and hour a day every day since and i haven't had any issues with reliability. They always start, read and play music fine. I mostly use USB as its easier for me to organise files and stuff rather than burning cd afer cd, although i do have a couple of pre mix cd's loaded for when i l'm just chilling out and want to listen to music. It ejects and accepts cd's in the slot nice and quickly and i do sometimes mix from cd if i find something old that i want to play. Whether this is an issue with tags or file format or what, sometimes the name of the track doesnt appear on screen when playing from cd, its just numbered.

[HarryK]

Just noticed your nick, awesome .
Thanks for the feedback as well.

[Irrational_Fear]

Nice review chap!

I was hoping somebody would get around to doing a review on these at some point as they seem to crop up a fair bit in budget-CD deck discussions!

I've always liked the look of these and the bigger NDX800/900s. They are a hell of a lot of player for the cash.

[ae86touge]

Cheers irrational. They are good for the money and i thought i'd write the review to let people know! I'll keep this thread posted if anything goes wrong with them

[Daniel S]

I too have a pair of these and for the money there's not much bad to say about them. I would say what I miss the most is a loop adjust.
As for the break function, check this video out. You might pick up a few more tips in there as well:

[ae86touge]

Yeah the loop adjust function would have been good. On these you just have to make sure you've got a perfect loop or it throws your mix out of match

[HarryK]

OK, a couple of questions: what is the accuracy of the pitch fader in the different pitch zones? Also, does scratch response have any difference from USB to CD?
Also, do you have any idea what the replacement cd tray may cost? Last but not least, have you had any problems thus far?

[ae86touge]

I find the pitch fader quite accurate in all pitch zones, although i only really use 4% and 16%. Scratch response is the same for usb and cd, all functions are. It doesn't have a tray its slot loading (like a car stereo) so im not sure how much a replacement tray would be! And last but not least no, i haven't had any problems! Sometimes on USB a track takes a couple of seconds longer to display on the screen but thats only if i go from one track to another track in a different folder really quickly. Its never not worked though.