What are people’s opinions on the denon prime 4? Cheaper then the XDJ-RX2. Is it worth having denon if majority of bars/clubs have pioneer, that is if the individual wants to pursue playing in those environments.
What are people’s opinions on the denon prime 4? Cheaper then the XDJ-RX2. Is it worth having denon if majority of bars/clubs have pioneer, that is if the individual wants to pursue playing in those environments.
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Last I checked, Denon had a conversion utility so you could play Rekordbox (Pioneer) USB drives on the Denon decks, but I don't think it goes the other way. But basically that is your problem right there is that Denon and Pioneer use different systems for the USB keys and Pioneer won't play Denon. Denon has limited ability to play Pioneer. That's how it stood last I checked.
Jury still seems to be out on the Prime 4. Since it's from Denon, the DJ world is expecting support and quality issues. Time will tell. I personally hope that the product does well and surprises everyone both short and long term.Originally Posted by EFlash
Again, time will tell.
-KLH
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I've read the books like How to DJ right... to learn about... beatmatching, phrasing w/e , Speed Test Scrabble Word Finder Solitaire but when I go to mix...
LOL I was trying to resist my usual anti-Denon stance, but yea, basically yea it would be GREAT if Pioneer had some real competition.. and for many years now, Denon has claimed to be that competition, and for many years now they've been wrong about that.. and now Pioneer has everyone locked into Rekordbox.. and personally, I'm not happy about it.. not happy at all, but maybe if Denon DJ spent less time trying to ACT big and more time BEING big, these last 20 years that I've been paying attention, then things would be different.
But they aren't, so jumping ship to Denon will result in you'll be stuck with flash drives that won't play at most clubs, or will be limited in some ways. And this situation is going to last until someone totally reverse engineers Pioneers format (without violating any license agreements.. and that's the hard part), or until someone somehow forces enough competition into the market for stand-alone decks that Pioneer feels like being incompatible is hurting them instead of helping them. Right now it's helping them and that means, for DJ's.. that if you want to play on those decks you have to use the Pioneer system, which is Rekordbox.
And too bad Denon, but you blew it.
Not sure I'd say they blew it. Change is hard and takes a long time.
I am not privy to Denon sales numbers, it would be very interesting to see how the Prime series is selling at $999 for the SC-5000 and DN-X1800 mixer. I feel like a douche for paying full price when it came out... But if you ignore the brand names and reputation of Pioneer and put a set of each companies equipment next to each other, the Denon is by far the better product - at less than HALF the price. This is probably Denons strategy, exactly what you suggested... flood the market by dropping the price and just get enough decks out there to get people to move over.
The new Prime 4 is something that people have been asking out of Pioneer for years...
I'm really interested to see what Pioneer does next. They have gone beyond their usual 3 years update cycle for the pro-line CDJ decks. I really don't know how they can offer a new deck for $2200 when the SC-5000's exist. They need to go sub-$1000.
Denon, of course, could have done a better job on the software front. While I think they nailed the hardware, Engine Prime is really far behind Rekordbox and they have been glacially slow with updates.
I really wish we as DJ's had demanded an open meta-data format years ago and forced the vendors to support it. This stuff is well understood at this point, and all the products are essentially at feature parity. Having a common container format that support various file existing compression schemes and allows for beatgrids, cue points, and all the basics seems so simple. It could just be extensions to an existing format.
The DJ equipment market has seemingly slowed as well. If you watch the rate of new product introductions, it's much less than years past. This certainly doesn't help drive things forward.
Last edited by Ryan Ruel; 04-13-2019 at 06:20 AM.
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I'll tell you how they blew it.
First, they stuck with the dual rack cd player and mixer format when Pioneer was winning everyone over with the tabletop format.. that's what everyone wanted.
Second, those Pioneer decks were GOOD. They were just better at playing a CD than Denon decks. Faster loading, more tolerant of different CDs, less laggy. Instead of tackling this problem head-on and making their decks better, Denon loaded-on features and pushed their moving platter as being superior.. which was irrelevant for most CD DJ's.. and only held back adoption of their decks in the club market. Pioneer dominated that market because they came in with the decks that people wanted, and they did the job and did it well.. and people knew and trusted that. Extra features and a lower price do not win people's trust.
I tried all those Denon decks when they came out from 1999 to around 2010.. the S3500 and S2900 being the last Denon decks I even bothered considering, and they still had a lot of basic shortcomings.. some of them were real crap (DN-S1000, holy moley what a joke). And yea, did they have a ton of features?? SURE. But at that point, Pioneer had been holding it down with mostly (with a very few exceptions) well loved products that DJs were used to, that did the job and everyone had come to trust. But Denon kept on doubling down on their old formula that with each passing year more firmly cemented their image as the not-quite-as-good-as-Pioneer brand. Which had some truth to it.. because they did not listen to DJs who were telling them WHY they preferred Pioneer, instead flogging their narrative that their moving platter and all their other buttons made them superior.. and anyone who disagreed was just a Pioneer fanboy... Well, that's no way to win people over, and it didn't work. If they'd come out, at the right time, with a deck that was every bit as good as a CDJ-1000 (and other Pioneer decks) at playing the CD, with an interface familiar enough for Pioneer users (who ALREADY owned the market by the early 2000's.. and Denon was too stupid to get that memo) that DJ's who walked into a club or party who saw those decks would not immediately be apprehensive about playing on them.. then they could have made the club CDJ/mixer market into a game that they and Pioneer were equal players in. Instead they tried to flip the market with a "disruptive technology" gambit (their platters and features) which were just not good enough to flip things. Club owners and sound companies (even small ones like myself) were NOT going to piss off their customers with Denon decks which were not what most DJs wanted and were not even really as good.. no club owner wants to fight that battle, certainly no sound company wants to buck the wishes of their customers.. and what the customers liked was Pioneer. And it was pointless to try to convince people that really really, Denon is better, just try it.. because IT WASN'T BETTER. Sure lots of mobile DJs were into the lower prices and hiphop guys liked the moving platter and all that.. but then, DVS was taking most of the scratch market. Denon "street" appeal did nothing for them in clubs where house, techno and trance.. more straight mixing styles of DJing.. were drawing bigger and bigger crowds.
Bottom line was, Pioneer won everyone's trust and nobody was going to screw their own business picking a product people didn't want, just because Denon really really wanted to be more successful. Speaking for myself, there's no way I could own any deck other than Pioneer, because I would just totally lose my sound rental business. Nobody wants to rent Denon decks, they're incompatible and they've got a bad reputation (earned), and I basically just can't show up at a gig with them, all hell would break loose because nobodies media would play on them. And for myself as a DJ, well.. when I show up to play somewhere, Pioneer decks are going to be there. That's what I'm going to have to play on.
Denon needed to get this memo sooner.
But yea as far as the format incompatibilities, I'm a software engineer so I totally get what you're saying.. there's zero reason for this all to be so difficult, that Pioneer or Denon or Traktor or whoever can't play nice together is totally for their benefit and not ours. But so, WTF, maybe Denon could have been leaders in that area, being the ones to work with NI and Serato etc to make libraries compatible, better yet to use standard playlist formats and standard tag formats to store everything, so that I could, u know.. just click-click on a playlist I made in Rekordbox and have it open on my Fiio music player or on my car stereo.... Beat Pioneer by making them the only incompatible ones. But I don't think Denon DJ has that kind of vision. All you gotta do is read their brand managers posts on their forum (and on this forum, in the past) to see what kind of vision Denon DJ has, and it's one in which they are just the best and everyone else is dumb for not getting it.. and that's as far as they go.
OH... you are going WAY back. I was just referring to the Denon brands "rebirth" under the InMusic umbrella.
Yes, if you look at the history, they completely blew it around the time the CDJ-1000 came out. They made a lot of bizarre product choices, support was poor, they had a terrible reputation in online forums...
But I don't think Denon of today is really much of Denon of old other than the name, no?
"Oooh look at me.... I wrote the Internet!"
I'm not sure.. haven't been paying too much attention to their corporate structure. Linkedin says that Silvio Z. is still brand manager, so inmusic obv thought his vision for the brand was ok all those years. Anyway, it doesn't matter.. because.. as I said:
And yea, given that the new player is designed after Pioneer.. to be comfortable for Pioneer users.. maybe they've wised up (after 20+) years to the reality that there are literally multiple generations of DJs playing on Pioneer decks.. DJs who learned on Pioneer CDJ's and mixers now have kids who are doing the same (some of them are friends of mine), maybe the fact that after 20 stubborn years they finally accepted that they missed that boat and that Pioneer won the game when it comes to defining what everyone thinks of as a DJ deck, and they have to work with that.. that could very well be an indication that they are making changes internally and are no longer going to make the dysfunctional decisions they made in the past.
I mean, one has to keep in mind that Denon corporate is a very good audio company that makes pro gear and hifi gear that is well respected, it's a mystery why for example the broadcast division didn't have more influence on the DJ division so far as developing a player that wasn't so laggy or with such crappy buttons. I really don't know what happened there.
Anyway, hope they get it together, but as I said above, meanwhile Pioneer is IT, that is what you will get in the clubs, because that is what DJs expect in the clubs, that is what they like, that's what they're used to, that's what their media is prepared for.. same for sound companies, we have to have Pioneer. Everyone is on the Pioneer train for better or for worse. And now Pioneer's got us all locked into Rekordbox so we have to stay with them or suffer extreme inconvenience. That's the opportunity that Denon let Pioneer have, and that's the opportunity they took. I don't have to like being locked in, I don't like it.. but I'm not dumb enough to back Denon at this point. As I said, they blew it, and that some may say that this new system of theirs corrects all the shortcomings of the past does not matter anymore because I cannot be the sound guy to show up at the gig with a deck that nobody can play on. And I certainly don't want to be the DJ who shows up to the gig with flash drives that don't play on the decks that are provided...
So yea, opportunity lost, Pioneer 1, Denon 0. And now, if Denon wants to get in there, and win that club market they always wanted, they'll have to make another opportunity for themselves.. and that's gonna mean (most likely), making a deck that doesn't just look and feel enough like a Pioneer deck, but that also is compatible with RB. Fully compatible. Which is going to be hard because Pioneer will confound them with updates if they can. Or, they will have to anticipate the NEXT BIG THING before Pioneer does. Which every company wants, but it ain't easy.
Meanwhile.. ya know, we DJ's have to do what's best for us. We can't help the situation that Denon made bad business moves that resulted in Pioneer being what it is, that is just how it is for us and we have to work with it. And really, Pioneer decks have truly been the best all along as far as I'm concerned, so it hasn't been a real burden to use em. It's just this Rekordbox lock in and now they are really milking different model variations to upsell you, at prices that are higher than ever. Pioneer DJ has def become more greedy since they were sold, and could use some competition. That's why it's too bad that Denon blew it. But they did.
You do realize the SC-5000's WILL play Rekordbox formatted drives, right?
The implementation isn't perfect (it's a bit slow), but it works and is usable.
https://www.denondj.com/kb/2375/
I'm no Denon fan boy (FAR from it). I've had 4 pairs of CDJ's over the years (1000 MK2's, CDJ-2000's, CDJ-2000NXS, CDJ-2000NXS2)!
Last edited by Ryan Ruel; 04-16-2019 at 03:58 PM.
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