Deft

Although I like to piss money away I'm not at the cutting edge of anything or pushed to upgrade. I did buy a PS5 / new TV on release, but other than that I'm not bothered. Desktop PC and monitors are now 7 years old and no real need to upgrade unless they catastrophically fail. Phones I don't really give a shit. DJ wise I'm set now. The next big thing for us could actually be whether to go electric on our cars. Both are now over 10 years old, so when they blow up I suspect it will be electric. I'd like to keep them running for a few more years though.

Right, I'm trying to get better at organising my "things to listen to" in life. I've just subscribed to you on YouTube, then maybe my phone will tell me there is new stuff. You are in very privileged company - I only have a few subscriptions - a guy who unblocks drains in Sydney and some competitive eaters.

Weirdly the UK site seems to have the bundle back in stock again, so I've tried re-ordering. If it goes through I'm going to be even more pissed off that they pretended there weren't any to replace my missing one. WIN WIN.

Yeah they refunded me. Didn't seem interested in investigating it, the Royal Mail tracking link just says still awaiting item from sender.

I probably deserved this, but my pre-order got lost in transit and there's none left to replace it.😒

Yeah I chickened out of one as our living room is on the neighbours side of the house. Really you'd think I'd be living in a nice detached mansion, but such is life.

The Qbert tutorial DVDs were pretty decent as I recall. Must be somewhere online you can watch them

Some stuff available now at uk.djshadow.com or www.djshadow.com if you are a filthy yank. I must be up to my 4th copy of Endtroducing by now.

Also as a final thought on this - these products generally will have totally rational engineering decisions, but perhaps that digital approach does have a marginal downside for certain use cases. But most people won't care and I suspect it makes the normal control a bit more robust.

The thing about it being potentially 0.05% steps sounds about right too. The Technics analog control feels somewhere between 0.02 and 0.05 % if using my ears / drift time as a benchmark vs. a cd player. So then consider the electronics engineering side of it. Those Technics people are not dumbos, they've implemented a digital control system for some benefits. I don't think it's a "digital" fader whatever that means. It's a standard analog fader / potentiometer with a digital control circuit attached. So it's still a big resistor varying a voltage, but that voltage gets converted into a digitally stepped output. So what's good about an analog fader and analog control circuitry? Well you can pretend it means it has infinite resolution but that's not true in reality. The change in voltage you see is still limited by the tiniest physical movement you can make. I'm sure the voltage varies a bit by simply wiggling the fader cap, add in some dust and dirt and you'll get a variable output. Also means if you want repeatability then moving the fader back to 0 and then some arbitary point on the fader is unlikely to give you exactly the same voltage. There's probably some smoothing circuitry in there. I dunno I'm talking bollox. If you slap a digital control circuit on the top of an analog fader - what do you get? Bit like a dj mixer, you can keep a cleaner control signal by tidying up the slightly variable voltage (e.g. dust / dirt). So it should be a bit more resilient. But the question is how small digital resolution steps can you lay over the top whilst maintaining some repeatability in the output. If you make the steps tiny then small changes in voltage will cause the output to keep wobbling. I suppose maybe this is "no worse" than the analog fader, but I can't imagine an electronics engineering bod being happy with it. 0.05% would to me be the nearest "rounded up" steps that would make sense to ensure you're not causing too much wobble in the output. That's my ill-informed speculation. Seriously though, fuck long mixes on a real turntable. Absolutely pointless nowadays. Digital files of digitally produced music in Serato + auto tempo match button and you don't even have to do any thinking about pitch control for most tracks. Everything stays locked together.

Ahhh my favourite topic - or it was when I used to review CD players for Skratchworx (nearly 20 years ago FFS). Now you can take my opinion with the pinch of salt it deserves, but I spent a huge portion of my dj'ing life playing extraordinarily boring progressive house music. But, the mixing was long and boring too - overlapping and holding tempos together for minutes at a time very delicately. This was all on a Technics SL1210mk2 setup. I was not an interesting or engaging dj, but fuck me I could make very smooth seamless mixes that sounded like they had been sequenced on a PC. It was what I aspired to, mixing perfection. I got super attuned to the smallest nudges in pitch control and would generally use the smallest physical movement of the pitch fader to keep things in time - just nudging it forward and backward every 5-10 secs to let the track drift up and down as close as possible around the perfect matched point. So I got a very good sense of how quickly things could drift at 130bpm-ish. Then I had Denon DN-S5000,S3000 and S1000 (owned S5000 and then a S3000, and reviewed the S1000). These things had various pitch control resolutions of 0.02 %, 0.05% and 0.1%. Ok you've got to be careful as if you are playing files straight from a digital source I suspect they have better inherent timing than a pressed record that you then record to playback (in those days I ripped lots of vinyl as you really couldn't buy much digitally if you didn't have the CDs). I remember you can see these little imperfections in timing if you are meticulously warping tracks in Ableton that came from vinyl. My intuitive feel and experience with those different pitch resolutions is that 0.02 % resolution is noticeable better control than a Technics SL1210mk2 (i.e. takes longer to fall out of sync, needs less babysitting). 0.05 % is quite comparable, though perhaps a little worse. 0.1 % is clearly worse. You could probably test this with some special record and nudging an analog pitch fader. I would say if the new Technics is really 0.05% steps you may well feel a little worse performance if you are very attuned to a long mixing style where you use the pitch fader nudging to control the drift.

Do you need a real turntable? I found the Rane Twelve and Denon Serato box worked pretty well for recreational cutting.

I tend to agree with Steve, the reason PC people like PCs, is that they are not handheld. But a bit of choice is good.

😒

I'm sort of glad it's not a fundamentally different performance machine, no incentive for me to piss money away on it.

I mean some people must get away with this, but the moment you are doing this you must think "fuck I'm gonna get caught eventually".

Allegedly my PC might be able to support a TPM, but Google just finds me a load of people who tried it and didn't get it working. I can't remember a core O/S feature that Windows has added in the last 20 years that has made any difference to the way I use it. Using OneDrive is about the only thing I do now that I didn't do before.

As I watched the demo I contemplated getting an Xbox Series X, mostly to have some kind of weird next gen console bragging rights. Plus you seem to get shit loads of games on the subscription thing with Microsoft. Plus that streaming thing you mentioned too. Plus just a change of console scenery. Then I realised the cable trunking in my room is so packed at the moment there's no way I'll get another HDMI lead in there, so that's the end of that, LOL.

Looks pretty amazing. I haven't played a proper driving game since forever. Last one was probably Midnight Club 2 on PS2.

Me and my brother used to use that OnLive service back in god knows when. It felt pretty cool and futuristic and worked OK for me. I treat my consoles as total loss of money - especially now I do digital only on Switch and PS5 - so I could happily use a streaming service and just be milked forever on a subscription. I already pay of Playstation Plus which I pretty much never use anyway.

2001 was my peak "house music" phase when I was buying records. That Atjazz album did seem pretty fresh when it came out, a little different kind of twist / sound to it. I didn't religiously follow stuff much after 2003-2004 so no idea what is out there nowadays. Looks like Atjazz has done loads of stuff since, just checked him out on Spotify.

Looks nice. I was so bored with my PS5 I bought COD Black Ops Cold War for FORTY English pounds. It does look decent and feels pretty smooth. I haven't played a COD game for ages. Maybe I should have waited for this.

Liking the sound. Whenever I hear the slightest bit of jazz and house beats I think of the album Labfunk, by Atjazz. You should check it out if you haven't heard it. It's ancient now but I always liked it. Not quite the same sound as you but similar feel.

The only other thing that comes up in a filesearch of my digi collection is the Cut & Paste records Zarecord 133.33bpm bit, but there's not loads of samples there (especially vocals) and it just sounds pitched up from some source file.

Actually that might be a digi-only thing, not sure it exists as a real record.