- There was a long stretch of years—from the mid-'90s to the mid-'00s—when Pioneer enjoyed a pretty firm grip on the market of professional DJ gear. CDJs and DJMs were fixtures on the rider of many a touring DJ, and as a result they became commonplace in many clubs. Time went on, hard drives got cheaper and the early wrinkles of the Traktors and Seratos of the world were ironed out to the point that they could be trusted for primetime use. Fast forward to 2010, and I think you would have a hard time finding many DJs who are still exclusively using CDs.
The executives in the pro DJ division of Pioneer seemed to finally embrace this sea change last year when they released their CDJ-900 and CDJ-2000 units, which offered support for the major digital DJ apps in the form of both MIDI and HID via USB. In addition, this new generation of CDJs also supports the sharing of one main source of music via Pro DJ Link, a proprietary protocol that runs over Ethernet. Now Pioneer is hoping to continue that momentum by releasing a new touchscreen mixer with the same type of technological advances. It's called the DJM-2000 and Pioneer has claimed it to be the "most powerful live remixing tool and FX processor to ever grace clubland."
The first thing you notice when taking the DJM-2000 out of the box is its size—almost five inches wider than the classic DJM-600. Most of that extra size is accounted for in the center section, which is shared by a beat effect section (reminiscent of the EFX-1000) on the top half and the DJM-2000's calling card—a 5.8" high touchscreen—on the bottom. Surrounding this middle section on each side are two channels of mixing controls, with more extra bits pushed out to each edge. Looking round back you might be startled to find more Ethernet jacks than your average home network router (six to be exact). These can be used to connect two laptops and up to four Pro-Link-supporting CDJs to the mixer.
The four channel strips each have your standard 3-band EQ that range from -26 dB to +6, but you can switch the behavior of all the EQs to match that of the DJM-1000 Isolators (which offer a complete kill of the frequency band). Directly underneath the EQs you'll find a knob labeled FILTER which actually controls the amount of the chosen Instant Instrument effect for that track. The INST FX (as they are labeled on the mixer) are close relatives to the DJM-800 effects—six types including noise, jet, zip, crush, LPF (low-pass filter) and HPF (hi-pass filter). The filters are the most useful of this bunch, but the other four can provide some interesting color to tracks when used properly.
As mentioned before, the beat effects and their controls are taken almost directly from the EFX-1000, including the push button beat-division controls. The DJM puts its own spin on things by giving the beat effects their own 3 band EQ, and adding a few new effects exclusive to the DJM-2000: the multi-tap delay, reverb, gate and, the most interesting of all, the slip roll. The slip roll is like the normal roll (in that it will repeat a certain amount of the track endlessly) but instead of adjusting the length of the existing sample loop, the beat-division buttons resample the loop each time you press them. It may sound simple, but it can be pretty amazing when resampling a melodic track at different loop lengths while at the same time tweaking the filter.
Of course the feature of the DJM-2000 everyone is talking about is the touchscreen mixer. This isn't Pioneer's first foray into touch control, as their high-end AV mixer (the SVM-1000) has had a similar touch design since October 2007. One would hope that since then they've seen enough road-testing to ensure that the DJM-2000 won't suffer the fate of the old Numark mixers with the Kaoss pad screens (which were discontinued due to a cracked screen epidemic). We weren't brave enough to give the screen a real bashing, but it seems sturdy enough to handle most DJ booth shenanigans. The touchscreen allows for two finger touch response and can be switched between four modes of operation: frequency mix, sidechain remix, MIDI control mode and live sampler control.
Frequency Mix is without a doubt the most useful of these four modes, as it gives you control (via crossfaders and transform buttons) over seven frequency bands on each of two selectable channels. This is a pretty ingenious design that allows for some really precise mixing control. Unfortunately the usefulness of the touchscreen takes a sizeable hit as you move into the other three modes. Sidechain remix is a cool concept, where you can choose to trigger one of seven effects on one track by the sound of another track (which you can fine tune by selecting any of 3 EQ bands). For example, you can choose to trigger a hi-hat type of sound on top of what is currently playing on channel 2 by the low end of channel 4. This has some novelty at first, but eventually the limited range of sounds you can achieve with it diminishes the shine.
Moving on to the third touchscreen mode, MIDI control, and you'll find four different page types of touchscreen MIDI controls—kind of like a mini monochrome Lemur. Unlike the Lemur, however, you can't change the page layouts, and all of the MIDI messages sent by the DJM-2000 are hardcoded—so whatever you're controlling has to support MIDI learn. The 5-pin standard MIDI out jack on the back also outputs MIDI clock, either from the auto BPM detection or from tap tempo. After doing some extensive testing with this, it was not too much of a surprise to find that the auto BPM mode was not nearly accurate enough to synchronize anything without major drifting, even on the most stripped down kick-heavy tracks.
The final page, the live sampler, gets to the core of the problem with Pioneer's philosophy for the DJM-2000, one which ultimately may prevent many non-Pioneer customers from considering it. Simply put, if you don't own a CDJ-900 or CDJ-2000, the live sampler, like many of the DJM-2000's features, is pretty much useless. You can record loops to a PC running Pioneer's rekordbox music organization software, but that's it. That may not seem like a big deal, but when looking at the big picture you realize you're paying for a lot of hardware and brains that you can't use. You can connect to a laptop via the USB and use the DJM-2000 as a 4-channel audio interface, and setup a new MIDI profile in a DJ app to accept the hard-coded DJM MIDI messages, but without the CDJs it's a pretty expensive standalone DJ mixer.
If you've already invested the two-to-four grand in a pair of the new generation CDJs, then there is a good chance that the DJM-2000 is for you. The Pro Link router features make it a great hub for Pioneer's new vision of the 21st century DJ, and features like the "now on play" CDJ backlighting control it offers are impressive. However, at $2500 street, it is hard to recommend it to those looking for a standalone mixer or a control surface for their digital DJ system. Despite the nice complement of effect possibilities, and the unique frequency mix mode of the touchscreen, the rest of the DJM-2000's features make it a tough sell for the money.
Ratings /
Cost: 2.5/5
Versatility: 3/5
Sound: 4/5
Ease of use: 4/5