Oxygen Thief

Hercules DJ Console

Inspired by my brother's recent purchase of a MIDI controller with a copy of Reason Adapted, and hankering after my own past while visiting my old comrade in musical arms, I fairly rushed out on Monday and bought the Hercules DJ Console. Review synopsis: it rocks so hard it makes me laugh.

Yes, it rocks, but it's by no means flawless, and none of the reviews I've seen of it seem to have anything much negative to say about it, except as a gaming sound card, which it isn't. However, I'm not one to pass up the opportunity to highlight a product's failings, so you'll see plenty of what I don't like as well as that which I do.

First off, so that we all understand what's being discussed here, the DJ console is a hobby DJ's cheap replacement for an expensive set of decks and a mixer, be they 1210s or CDJ1000s or whatever. It isn't actually a mixer, or a pair of decks - it's actually just a USB1.1 controller which manipulates some DJ software, in the case of the Mac edition it is a cutdown Traktor, but for Windows you get several packages. The controller is nothing without the software, and the software in turn is pretty much useless without the controller.

It is pretty cool - the size is a good match with my little laptop, the sliders and pots seem pretty sturdy and there are rubber pads on every corner. There's a nice velcro-attachable strap so taking it places shouldn't make you nervous, and it's so small it shouldn't piss you off either. It also comes with a snap-on case to cover all the delicates while in transit.

But enough about the look, how does it work? In general, pretty well. The two jog wheels can be used for a number of things, but I bet that the first thing that comes to everyone's mind is scratching. Obviously I went straight for the wheels of steels, to cut up the record like a samurai soldier. Or not.

Scratching is actually rather tricky, perhaps because my laptop isn't fast enough, or maybe I can blame it on USB latency, but the upshot is that it's not responsive enough and the actual scratching isn't fast enough to do it well. What's more, when you scrub the audio really fast, you get a kind of ringing-bell distortion, so it's not really useful for that. Finally, it seems to buffer the amount of jog wheel spinning that has been done, and even after you stop the spinning, it keeps on scrubbing through the audio until it's ready to stop. Given that there is no obvious direct link between the jog wheels and the audio, it would have been far better just to detect when it's spinning, in what direction and how fast, rather than record how much it has been spun. I'd like it to stop scrubbing as soon as I stop the jog wheel spinning.

Aside from that, it does the other mixing stuff well. A neat, obvious feature is beat-matching; it recognises the beats well for obvious stuff, but for trickier beats, such as breaks, it has trouble. Two four-to-the-floor house tracks it can pretty much dial in immediately and lock together for the duration, but for other stuff you have to manually tweak it as it often guesses wildly wrong. Plug played at 85bpm does actually sound remarkably like a Wagon Christ B side.

But it does realtime time stretching as well as simply slowing down the playback, so you can lock the pitch to the original and still beatmatch, which will probably be useful once I stop being such a beginner, for now I am having trouble with the rhythms - the pitch can wait! Typically tracks aren't sped up or slowed down more than a few percent, so there aren't any especially noticeable artefacts from the stretching.

One big gripe is that the file explorer interface is poor - it displays a lot of meta-information but opening a folder with a lot of subdirectories or files takes a very long time, during which you can't use the app. What's more it's not unicode aware so my Japanese techno comes up as garbled nonsense. I think the way forward (and to be fair I think this is recommended in the PDF on the CD) is to make short playlists for each set before you start; my music folder contains a few hundred directories with a few thousand files - very slow.

So the file explorer isn't great, but with the console you can use the little joystick and its two buttons to nudge through the files and load them automatically in to either virtual deck. This is very useful and works much better than dragging them with the mouse. Once a track is loaded, you can nvigate through it using the jog wheels. It's fast, but Traktor needs to "Analyse" tracks in advance in order to build their waveforms, rather like Sound Forge, otherwise it spends a lot of time drawing the waveform as you navigate through the track.

Whether or not you choose to Analyse in advance (and it takes about 45 seconds for a 5 minute track) it's faster just to use the mouse, and again if you spin the wheels (and they are very easy to spin) Traktor buffers the spin and starts scrolling through the track until it has finished working through all that spin data. This usually equals the end of the track.

Also the play marker seems to jump from perceived beat to perceived beat, which is a bit off-putting. Doubtless I'll get used to it, but I would much prefer a smooth scrub. This is a very minor problem though. A big problem for me is the multi-function buttons. One button chooses the function, and 3 others are used with each separate function. On the face of it, these are really cool. The mode button switches between transport, cue, FX and loop:

• transport - use the jog wheels like decks - scratch, move within tracks
• cue - set up up to 3 cue points using the 3 buttons
• FX - use the 3 buttons to choose low-pass, high-pass and band-pass, and the jog wheels to move the cutoff freq
• loop - use the 3 buttons to set up instant loops of 1, 4 or 8 beat lengths. Use the jog wheel to move the loop boundaries, 1 beat at a time.

Pretty useful, except when you want to set up a loop and do some fx at the same time - you can't cancel the loop and the FX at once - you need to cancel one and then press the mode button until it cycles to the other, then you have to cancel that. Impossible to do all at once. If your loop is 4 or 8 beats long, you might get good enough to cancel the loop at its start and then use the remaining 3 or 7 beats to get ready to cancel the FX. It's not easy. There should be a "cancel all" button.

Sound quality is excellent - it sounds better than the built in sound card, which itself is supposed to be pretty good on the Powerbooks. It has 3 sets of stereo outputs as well as the headphones, although I'm not really sure why - a DJ doesn't really even need stereo, let alone 5.1 Dolby Surround, but they're there. There are also a couple of MIDI ports, a couple of TOSlinks and other things which are doubtless important to some. It's nice to see on what's basically a cheap piece of kit. There's also a talkover mic input, which attenuates the output by 3, 6 or 12dB when you want to talk over the music. I'm going to stick a piece of Rizla over that input, and if you ever find it broken, you have permission to shoot me.

The software is pretty similar to normal Traktor, but stripped down somewhat. There is much poorer control over the filters, and no resonance control - what good is a swept low pass without a disgracefully high Q? But the filters provided, accessible through the multifunction buttons described above, are more than adequate for some basic DJ effects.

So far, pretty negative huh? Well, these little complaints belie the fact that this unit is simply great fun. Even as I sat down for the first time, manual left unopened, and dinner largely uneaten, I could feel my heartbeat rising as I synced up my first mix. Using the headphone monitor I set it up so that the beats matched and I can hear the second track building up as the first starts to plateau. Oops, they've gone out of sync, but one press of the usefully backlit Sync button sorts it out. We're back on for the mix... the tracks lined up perfectly in sync, I slam the crossfader over with all the subtlety of a bull elephant getting it's point across to a young upstart...

...and you can almost hear the stampede of people leaving the dancefloor. Sure, the beats matched fine, but my timing was shocking and those two tracks simply didn't go well together. The Hercules DJ Console helps you mix tracks together, but it doesn't make you a good DJ. In fact, this is the most disappointing thing about the system - it seems as though there is still some skill and familiarity with the music required. However that first mix was so satisfying despite its appalling execution that I'm not licking my wounds, I'm cueing up the next track. Without even waiting for the end I'm beat-matching and - *clang* - another shocking mix between two perfectly synchronised tracks.

This thing is fun! As time ticks on I'm making excuses for not doing my washing, not hacing a shower, and then not going to bed. By the next morning I've invented some spurious reason for coming in late - something about Parcelforce I'm not convinced my boss entirely buys. She saw me come back from Turnkey with the box yesterday. She knows.

Posted by Oxygenik at December 2, 2004 4:50 PM