AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ One Year On: Still A Good Buy?

A year ago, we told you the AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ was the ultimate all-in-one DJ unit. After 12 months of using it ourselves, plus feedback from students at Digital DJ Tips and the wider community, we’re now in a position to answer the big question: one year on, should you still buy it?

The launch crisis nobody saw coming

When we reviewed this exact production unit, we couldn’t know it was going to have issues right from the beginning. AlphaTheta had to deal with units arriving with obvious physical defects – screens falling off, audio dropouts, system freezes. For some buyers, this wasn’t a good purchase from day one.

Your experience depends entirely on whether you got one of the problem units or one that worked fine. Ours has worked absolutely fine since the very beginning.

AlphaTheta dealt with it openly. They issued firmware upgrades that helped with libraries not showing properly and other issues. Quite quickly, it was ironed out. The critical firmware Ver. 1.05 (released November 2024) addressed the no audio output, display blackouts, and system freezes that plagued early units. They restored market confidence fast.

The good news is that AlphaTheta kept their big launch promise: Serato integration arrived in December 2024, meaning DJs don’t have to use Rekordbox – you can just plug it in and unlock Serato DJ, free of charge. That was promised, and it arrived.

What we didn’t expect…

On arrival, it had Beatport as a streaming service, which is cool, especially as Beatport has started folding all Beatsource music in. But there’s actually a couple streaming services to choose from, as they also unexpectedly dropped Apple Music support in March 2025, which can now be added alongside your own cloud music.

But here’s the thing: competitors out there have five or six streaming services working. The XDJ-AZ is not up to speed with units like the Denon Prime 4+, which offers Beatport, Beatsource, SoundCloud, Tidal, and Amazon Music in standalone mode.

That came with the latest firmware (1.24), which also fixed the annoying “Library is not responding” errors that kept popping up for some users, so they’re still supporting it with regular updates.

What we’ve loved

We’ve got to be honest – we’ve absolutely loved the SonicLink wireless headphones. The AlphaTheta HDJ-F10 headphones work with the unit using their proprietary take on Bluetooth, without the delay. This unit, even a year on, is the only one in their range that lets you do that. You simply press a button at the front and these headphones (not cheap, mind) work wirelessly. We initially thought, “Who needs that?”…but actually, we ended up really liking it. It’s just nice!

Touch Preview is great – you can listen to tracks without fully loading them up. It’s not the first unit to have this, but we did like having it here.

Get the pro skills to DJ on ANY gear: The Complete DJ Course

The Master EQ over the master output is brilliant. This unit is designed, maybe more so than club gear, to be plugged directly into a PA system. Being able to EQ for a PA you haven’t got control over (or to alter the EQ as the venue fills up) is a really solid feature over the competition.

The limitations that emerged

One thing we weren’t so sure about? Four-deck capability. Here’s why: on the screen, you can only have two stacked waveforms showing, meaning you’re not getting the full four-deck experience. You’ve got four decks you can select, but the main waveforms only show two at a time. Now combine that with not having four physical decks, and claiming “four-deck capability” becomes a bit shaky.

It’s good to have four-deck playback, but it’s not really something many DJs use. And if you do try it on the AZ, it’s a bit fiddly. That’s by design – it’s never going to be any different. The Prime 4+, its biggest competitor, does this better, though.

However, just as with the XDJ-XZ before it, many people use the extra channels to plug record decks and other items in around the back, making this the centre of their DJing hub. In that instance, it’s not really a drawback.

What’s NOT coming

This bit is important: the XDJ-AZ lacks features that are not going to arrive. They’re not going to introduce a sampler you can trigger from the performance pads, and they’re not going to introduce stems. We’re pretty sure about these things, and these are two features the Prime 4+ has.

If these things are important to you, there’s no point buying this and waiting for them to turn up. They might come later, but they’ll come in a further model. We know how this company works – they might add an extra streaming service or two, but big feature changes just aren’t coming in our view.

And yet this is £1,000 more than the Prime 4+.

So is it worth the extra?

One way of thinking about this is that you’re paying a “muscle memory tax”. If you’re an aspiring club DJ, if it’s really important to you to be in the ecosystem where this piece of gear sits – in other words, if you want something that feels as close as possible to club gear – this is unsurpassed. The XDJ-AZ is the one you want.

Read this next: Why Pioneer DJ & AlphaTheta Gear Is The Industry Standard (Whether You Like It Or Not)

It’s as close as possible to club gear without being two or four CDJs and a DJM-A9 mixer. It was launched with that in mind. This range has always been like that. If being close to club gear is most important to you, paying that extra £1,000 is a no-brainer.

But if you want technology, if you don’t mind being in a sandbox with better tech, you’re going to get an awful lot more for your money with the Denon DJ Prime 4+. It has stems (you analyse them beforehand, but they’re there), a sampler, more streaming services, and a better way of DJing on four decks where you can see more of what you’re doing.

 

 

The reliability question

This would usually be the place where we’d say “think about reliability”. Both brands tell you their gear is reliable. This brand normally is. Well, as you know this has had its reliability issues, and we can’t say hand on heart that you’re not going to have a problem with it.

There were clearly manufacturing pressures and issues early on with this unit. While most units now work fine, and the firmware fixes addressed the major problems, if you’re going to buy the XDJ-AZ a year on, make sure you’re getting a current production model. Definitely update the firmware (currently at 1.24), but also make sure you buy from somewhere where you can get your money back if there are issues (because we can’t guarantee there won’t be).

The laptop reality

“Buying an XDJ-AZ means laptop-free, right?” This question often trips up DJs when they buy standalone units that imply you don’t need a computer. That’s not actually true, and it’s the same with all brands: you still need the laptop.

With this one, you need to use the laptop software to get your Apple Music account working. You also need the USB drive plugged into a laptop to authenticate a login. You don’t get the Apple Music login without being logged into Rekordbox Cloud…and you don’t get Rekordbox Cloud without having Rekordbox on your laptop to set it all up. You also can’t rate tracks, build playlists, edit metadata from the unit – again, it has to happen ahead of time on a laptop.

You don’t have to pay anything extra for Rekordbox software either – you can just use the free version to do what we just described. But you do need to use the software at the centre of this company’s DJ experience to get this unit working properly. You can’t just buy it, take it out the box, connect it to your Wi-Fi, log into Apple Music, and be going.

If you’re someone who doesn’t like messing around with laptops and getting stuff set up, you won’t like this unit so much. If you’re a bit old school and like to throw your music onto a USB drive and plug it in, this is painful, as it’s not designed for that.

Sadly, Rekordbox is the “Microsoft Word” of DJ software right now. It’s a necessary evil – you’re going to have to use it. By the way, it’s largely the same with the Prime 4+, which runs Engine DJ. You’re not quite so reliant on the laptop with that software, but you still are, and again, Engine DJ isn’t particularly brilliant either. It’s definitely the weak point when you talk to users of that platform, just like Rekordbox is the weak point with this one.

It’s not a deal breaker in either instance, but don’t think you can get away without going near a laptop with the XDJ-AZ, because you can’t.

The Verdict

If club standard – if being close to what club gear is like – is what’s most important to you, you probably already know this unit is a no-brainer. The layout and feel replicates the CDJ-3000 and DJM-A9 perfectly. The muscle memory you build here transfers directly to club set-ups worldwide. That’s what you’re paying for. If not, you’re going to get a lot more for your money with competitors like the Prime 4+.

That’s how it was at launch, and that’s how it is now. After a year of real-world use, firmware updates, and competitive evolution, the XDJ-AZ remains what it was designed to be: the closest thing to club-standard gear in an all-in-one package. It’s not trying to be the most feature-rich unit on the market – it’s a professional club simulator.

Go here next: Free AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ Training Tutorial & Video Manual

The initial manufacturing crisis was handled well, the promised features arrived, and ongoing support continues. But the feature gaps – no stems, limited streaming services, basic preparation tools – aren’t going away. That said, we don’t think it will be replaced any time soon, so if what this is is what you’re looking for, it’s still very much a good buy.