Stazbumpa

Vintage has the right of it, there is no “best”, just what’s best for you.

The “real McCoy” is whatever you use successfully, Pioneer has no more right to this title than anyone else. If Traktor is working for you, and you know it, then stick to it. When it stops working then by all means consider a move to another platform, but until then if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it mate.
My real McCoy is TSP 2.6.8 and my Denon kit, other people would’nt get on with this setup but I do.

Play across the board 80’s & 90’s and collect the win.

Overpriced, mediocre components, Pioneer logo.

They will sell loads of them.

Figure out your maximum budget and go from there. As bob points out, ignore studio cans and get DJ ones. They will only really go as loud as your headphone amp on the mixtrack will let them anyway, so quality of sound and isolation are the main factors. Besides, too loud = knackered ears.

This is now the part where I tell you to get the Sennheiser HD25’s.

My gear at my residency:

• This reply was modified 8 years, 4 months ago by Stazbumpa.

@Craig Hodges

Breakbeat/Hardcore was my thing when I first started DJ’ing, I also played a lot of hard techno and hard trance. I thought it was the only music I would ever want to play, how wrong I was 🙂 The Pleasuredome was my local rave, I never got a chance to play there, although they still do one off events locally every so often so one day, maybe.
A lot of the DJs use the Pioneer CDJs of Great Expense, but that’s because someone else is paying for them. Slipmatt uses a controller regularly, he played in my town a year or so ago and used one then.

As for your controller options, for £250 you are probably best off going for either the Numark Mixtrack Pro 3 or the Pioneer DDJ SB2. Both are excellent Serato controllers and if you upgrade to the full Serato DJ software (well worth it) the Pioneer clocks in bang on your budget whereas the Mixtrack is £40 cheaper.

Neither of these controllers has a balanced line output and neither has a booth output, you’re stuck with a main phono out. It shouldn’t be a huge problem unless you’re playing in a club and need a monitor speak hooking up. To get a good controller with separate booth output (and a balanced line incidentally) you’re looking at something like the Denon MC4000 which is about £50-60 over your budget.

You can probably get them cheaper if you look online, I used Decks as a guidline for prices here but they tend to be a bit more expensive than other e-retailers. Thomann are known to be good for prices, I got my Denon kit from them.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 5 months ago by Stazbumpa.