Denon DJ Prime 4 Gen 2 Standalone DJ System Review

Video Review

First Impressions / Setting up

The box tells you a lot before you open it, and what struck me first was how much hasn’t changed – I mean this in a good way. Four mixer channels, long-throw pitch faders, the 10.1-inch tilting touchscreen, the pads across the bottom, the microphone and output section over on the right.

Look closer, though, and the slicer has gone from the pad modes to be replaced by stems; drums, melody and vocals are printed on the front panel; the effect strips that used to sit above the channels have been swapped for paddles up at the top; the beatgrid controls have disappeared; and there are four new buttons marked source, browse, mixer and menu. The old two-band booth and zone EQ knobs are nowhere to be seen either, which had me guessing that they had moved onto the screen.

Out of the box, the colour is the first thing you notice. I wasn’t expecting it, and it reminds me of old-school mixers, or maybe even a classic ghetto blaster. I like it! The brushed finish is more pronounced than before and runs across the mixer section as well, the chrome trim looks good, and the whole thing feels every bit as solid as the unit it replaces.

Finally, bigger jogwheels

The jogwheels are noticeably bigger at a full eight inches, which is one complaint people levelled at the Prime 4 that Denon has now fixed. They have hard LED lights inside them rather than a screen, so no more track artwork on the platters, but the artwork is on the main display anyway and what they have put there instead is more useful. The faders have been redesigned as dual-rail items too, and they feel it.

The pads are the other physical change you feel immediately. There are 16 of them and they are MPCe pads, from the Akai Pro MPC range (same company as Denon DJ), so they are not there to look pretty. Denon says they are velocity- and pressure-sensitive and use 3D sensing to work out where on the pad your finger has landed, which is what makes the multi-zone tricks further down possible. They have a nice bit of give to them and there is a lot going on underneath, which we will come to.

Just add… a guitar?

Round the front, all the knobs and buttons have gone, and round the back there is something I don’t remember seeing on a DJ controller before: an instrument switch on the microphone inputs, so you can plug a guitar in and jam over your set. The line and phono inputs are switchable as usual, and the output section is unchanged, with unbalanced RCA master, balanced XLR master, and balanced XLR for booth and zone.

There is also a three-pin DMX output, which puts it in the same company as AlphaTheta’s DDJ-FLX10, except that the lighting control here runs through SoundSwitch rather than Rekordbox, and SoundSwitch is leagues ahead. Philips Hue and Nanoleaf are supported onboard as well, which will matter to livestreamers and anyone lighting a small room. We are not covering lighting in this review, but it is worth knowing how much of it is there.

Setting up

Setting up is as easy as Denon has made it on any recent unit. Peel the plastic off, switch it on, join your Wi-Fi, and it tells you there is an Engine DJ update waiting. Update it before you do anything else, not least because Denon has gone as far as sticking a label on the unit telling you to. If you already have an Engine DJ account, you hold your phone up to the QR code on screen and it logs you in. If you don’t, get one, because that account is what unlocks the streaming sources and the wider Engine DJ ecosystem, and you will want to register on the website first.

Once you are in, it shows you any sources already attached to your account, mine being Tidal and Dropbox, and lets you add more. The onboard streaming list now runs to Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Beatport, SoundCloud Go+ and Tidal, which is a longer list than anything else in this class offers – and they say Spotify is coming, too.

Streaming aside, I suspect most people will carry on doing what they have always done, which is prepare in Engine DJ on a laptop and then bring the music over on an SD card, a USB stick, or an internal drive fitted into the bay underneath. That is still the fastest, most reliable way to work with this unit, and there is a hard drive slot on the back for anyone who wants their whole collection living inside the console with nothing hanging off it.

In Use

Stems, stems, everywhere

Stems are the biggest new thing for me, not those MPC pads, and they’re really nicely integrated. There is one thing you need to understand before you rely on them, though, which is that you do not want to be analysing tracks on the unit on the fly. It takes too long, even though it can do it. You analyse ahead of time on your laptop, or you set a playlist analysing on the unit overnight and leave it to get on with it. Ask it to prepare stems for a track at the moment you want to play the track and you will be disappointed, because it takes a while. Prepare properly and everything below is available to you.

Once tracks are analysed, stems turn up in more places than you might expect. There is a stems pad mode giving you drums, melody, vocals and bass. There are acapella and instrumental buttons at the top of each channel that switch the whole track over instantly. Hold shift and hit those and you get an echo-out of the half you are removing, which is more musical than simply killing it, and you can flip that behaviour round in the settings so echo-out is the default if that is the one you prefer.

Then, if you hold shift and press the cue button, the channel knobs become stem level controls, so you can fade drums, melody and vocals in and out by hand rather than just switching them. Note that you get three stems there rather than the four you get on the pads, with the bass line missing. In practice I found the shift-and-cue stem levels the most useful of the lot, because that is where stems stop being a party trick and start being mixing.

MPC pads – cool, but niche

The MPCe pads are where Denon DJ has spent its imagination, and this is the part I am least sold on. Denon is calling them an industry first, and to be fair, nobody else has put multi-zone pads in a standalone unit, so the marketing department can have that one.

Press a pad mode button once and you get the standard stuff: hot cue, loop, loop roll and stems, all of which behave exactly as you would want. Press it twice, or hold shift, and you fall into a second layer.

Hot cue pressed twice gives you hot cue roll, where the four corners of each pad trigger different roll lengths from that pad’s cue point. Shift and hot cue gives you the same cues but split into acapella and instrumental, so you hit the left of the pad for the vocal from that cue and the right for the instrumental. Loop pressed twice is nothing to do with looping at all, it is the sampler. Shift and loop is a stems version of auto loop. Stems pressed twice gives you XY effects. Shift and stems is lighting mode.

It is all clever, and I can see a certain kind of DJ having a lot of fun with it (maybe they come into their own with lighting control, for instance). For me most of it is gimmicky and nothing in there struck me as a must-have. One small annoyance while you are in there: once you have triggered a hot cue in acapella or instrumental mode there is no way back out from the pads themselves, you have to switch it off at the top of the channel, unless I am missing something.

None of which counts against the unit: You can go into the settings and configure exactly what each bank of pads does, right down to putting the slicer back if you missed it, so if none of the new layers appeal you switch them off and you have your familiar layout with nothing lost. On a system this capable, no DJ is ever going to use everything it does.

Extra features only cost a unit marks when they get in the way of doing the normal job, and these stay out of the way completely until you go looking for them. Denon DJ has added a lot here without taking the simple route away, and that is the right way round.

Generation 2 jogwheels

The bigger jog wheels are a straightforward win, and the LED rings around them are more useful than the artwork they replace. The centre tells you which stem you are on, whether that is vocals, melody, bass or drums. The outer ring shows playback position and follows your finger when you nudge or spin back. The inner ring shows how much of the track is left.

There is also a coloured bar at the bottom telling you how close you are to the next hot cue, with beats dropping away as you move off one and building up as you approach the next, which Denon has clearly borrowed from Serato. I am not convinced how useful that is, but it is right there in your eyeline if you want it. The deck colours are on the rings too, and you can change them in profile settings, so I set deck four to Digital DJ Tips purple because I could.

Paddle FX… albeit in a strange place

The paddle effects are the change I expected to like most, and I did. They replace the effect strips that used to run across the top of the channels on the Prime 4, which gave you plenty of versatility but were never the most intuitive way to work. Push a paddle up to lock the effect on, pull it down for momentary, which is how paddles should behave.

Hit the select button underneath and the screen gives you the full effect list, and you can hold a button down to save a favourite to it, so if you live on echo you can have echo one press away for good. Beats sets the division, amount sets how much you hear, and feedback sets how hard the effect bites, so a high feedback on echo gives you a long tail and on reverb a much bigger space.

They are of course post-fader, which is why you can still hear the tail when you pull the channel down. One thing I couldn’t work out was the frequency parameter on the display, which didn’t respond to either knob or to shift, and normally decides which band the effect works on. Either I have missed something in the manual or it is not wired up yet, and I will cover it properly in the video manual and training tutorial whatever.

Fader, sweep and XY FX

Fader effects are the other addition, and they are nicely done and a lot of fun. Instead of a fader simply cutting or fading the track, moving it away from where it was triggers an effect as well. You get several echo/reverb etc options, with the same feedback and beats controls, and you choose whether the crossfader, the channel faders, or both set them off. There is also a disarm-after-trigger option, so it fires once and then gets out of your way without you having to switch it off.

I ran two copies of the same track and mixed between them using fader echo in one direction and echo down in the other, and it took about two seconds to get a transition that would normally need three hands. If you mix quickly and you like an echo out, you will use these constantly.

The sweep effects on the knobs above the channels are untouched, other than a new reverb joining them, which stacks nicely with the fader effects. The XY effects pad, which puts two effect parameters under your finger on the touchscreen, has been in Engine DJ for a while but it is worth knowing it is on here as well as on the pads, and you can pick from things like LFO echo and filter echo and push them around in two dimensions.

Add it all up and you have more than 25 main effects, 10 touch effects, four fader effects and four sweep effects, which is a bigger toolkit than most DJs will ever get through, and unusually for this class of unit, all of it is on the hardware rather than buried in a menu.

Functions on the touchscreen

All the front and top panel controls that have disappeared have gone onto the touchscreen, and the four new buttons are how you get to them quickly. Press mixer and you get four tabs. Channel inputs is where you set each of the four channels to Engine DJ, Bluetooth, computer or line in, which is a much better place for it than the little switches it replaces. The crossfader assign controls live here too, so you set each channel to through, A or B, along with the crossfader contour curve and whether the fader style sits left or right.

The effect assign for the two paddles across the four channels is here, and so are the extra microphone controls, where you choose reverb or echo, set whether the mic goes to booth, zone or headphones, and switch it on or off, with the amount still on the physical knob. Best of all is the equaliser tab. The Prime 4 gave you low and high EQ knobs for booth and zone; the G2 gives you a 10-band EQ for booth, zone and the main output. That is not a loss of functionality, it is a proper step up, and anyone who plays rooms with a difficult PA or a second zone will feel it.

The library side has picked up the improvements we first saw on the Rane System One, because both units are running the same generation of Engine DJ, version 5.1. The playlist banks marked A, B and C let you hold a button down while you are in a playlist you use a lot and then jump straight back to it, which saves a surprising amount of navigating. The browse encoder is better too: turn it to scroll, push it left or right to move which column you are scrolling through, push it up to see the track’s details and give it a star rating, and pull it down to preview a track through your headphones only. Small things, but they are the small things you do 200 times a night.

OmniSource for easy switching between platforms

There is also a waveform style setting with an RGB option, which changes the waveforms to the look software users know. That is there because of what Denon is calling OmniSource, the architecture that lets you flip a channel between internal media and a laptop, and the software list is Serato DJ Pro, Algoriddim djay and VirtualDJ. We didn’t test any of them, because the mappings are coming rather than shipping, and Traktor is the curious omission given that the same parent company now owns it. Channels will also take Bluetooth from a phone or tablet, and the unit takes a wireless keyboard, which is worth setting up if you search a big collection by name.

A few practical things to know. The G2 is slightly deeper than the Prime 4, by about a centimetre, which is not much until you own a flightcase with a cut-out sized for the old unit. It works with a pair of LC6000 controllers plugged straight into it, which is a nice option if you want a bigger playing surface.

Sadly the Ethernet socket has gone, so everything in and out is over Wi-Fi. I think that is a mistake. This is a high-end unit, Denon is leaning hard on streaming, and being able to hardwire a console you are relying on has always been worth having. If your Wi-Fi is solid it is a non-issue, but not every venue’s Wi-Fi is solid.

Shhh! but offline locker is coming

There is one piece of streaming news that isn’t in the press release, and we got it direct from the manufacturer: tracks from Tidal and from the Spotify integration will be able to be downloadesd to an offline cache, meaning you won’t need a connection to play them. Note that Spotify isn’t on the announced list of services, which currently runs to Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, Beatport, SoundCloud Go+ and Tidal, so treat it as a promise rather than a feature until it turns up. If it lands as described, though, it removes the single biggest objection to streaming on a standalone unit, which is what happens when the internet goes down mid-set.

Everything else is what you would hope for. It looks good, it sounds good, and it is snappy, faster than any previous Engine DJ unit bar the System One, which is the same generation and feels about the same. Denon puts that down to an eight-core ARM processor and 4GB of RAM, and claims four times the processing power of the previous generation. I can’t measure that, but I can tell you that nothing hung up on us, nothing needed a restart, and I never found myself waiting for the screen, which is not something you could always say about the Prime 4 with a big library loaded.

Conclusion

If you own a Prime 4 or a Prime 4+ and you have been wondering whether to jump, I wouldn’t think twice. This is the flagship now, and if the last generation is anything to go by, this is the unit Denon will be developing, updating and adding features to for the next seven years while the old one gradually gets left behind. The Prime 4 launched back in January 2019 and has had a remarkable run, but it has had its run.

You will feel at home on the G2 within about a minute, and you get stems, paddles, fader effects, the bigger jogwheels, the 10-band output EQ and the promised streaming work on top. The MPCe pad layers are not for me, but they switch off, so if you feel the same they cost you nothing. The missing Ethernet socket is the one change here that takes something away rather than adding it, and on a unit at this price I think that was a poor decision. Neither is a reason not to buy.

The same goes if you have always liked the idea of Engine DJ. It is not DJ performance software, and you cannot plug a laptop running it into a plain controller and go, because it only makes sense with standalone gear. What it is is the most capable standalone platform out there, usually first with the features, first with stems, first with a sampler in a standalone unit, and continually developed. And the G2 is the best expression of it currently available.

What are the alternatives?

Three alternatives are worth weighing before you spend. The Rane System One shares this generation of software and most of the feature set, so it is the one to look at if you want what the G2 does in a different form factor. The Prime 4+ is the interesting one, because it is now the outgoing model and dealers will be clearing it, so check what your local retailer is asking. If you can save several hundred pounds and you can live without stems, the paddles, the fader effects and the bigger jogwheels, it is still a fine console and it is not about to stop working.

My honest view is that stems alone are worth the difference, and the G2 has seven years of development ahead of it while the Prime 4+ has none, so a clearance saving buys you a unit that starts falling behind on day one. But it is a real option if the budget is the deciding factor rather than the features.

The third is AlphaTheta’s XDJ-AZ, and choosing between that and this is the same decision it has always been. Rekordbox, Pioneer DJ and AlphaTheta hold roughly 70% of the market against Engine DJ’s 15%, and clubs are still overwhelmingly Rekordbox. Buy the XDJ-AZ and you get fewer features, no stems and a much shorter list of streaming services, for more cash, but you can move in and out of any club booth without thinking about it. Buy this and you get considerably more for your money, as long as that compatibility doesn’t matter to you. You can put a Rekordbox-analysed USB into the G2 and it will play, but it isn’t designed for it and you won’t get the best out of it.

So the answer depends on where you play rather than on how good the gear is. Mobile DJs who want their lighting running out of the same box as their music, serious hobbyists who want the most features their money can buy, and anyone already invested in Engine DJ should stop reading and go and get one. Working club DJs who need to turn up and plug into whatever is installed should accept the compromise and buy the flagship in the other ecosystem instead. For everyone else, the Denon DJ Prime 4 G2 is the most powerful standalone DJ system on the market and the best Engine DJ has ever been.