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Hercules USB DJ Console Reviewed
SpinnerBait writes "Professional DJs and House-Party Beat Masters alike, will certainly be
interested in a new product that the folks at Hercules Audio are bringing to
market shortly. Although you may remember Hercules for being one of the
first in PC Graphics, HotHardware has a review and showcase up that takes a look at the new Hercules
USB DJ Console. This little deck comes with dual mixing pads, for
blending and scratching of your favorite MP3s etc. It also takes over as your main
PC sound system, with full Dolby 5.1 capabilities, when plugged into any PC via
USB."
So you're trying to tell me that professional DJs are going to ditch their pair of 1200s and huge collection of vinyl for some shitty little piece of plastic with a USB connector on it?
Sure thing.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
A six channel, 24 bit USB audio interface for under $250 is not bad at all... Forget the pads, it might actually make a nice audio interface for home musicians. I wonder how well it works with the popular multitrack software such as Cakewalk, Cubase, etc...
They are n't going to do that, but a hell of a lot of DJ Wannabes' would and that's a much larger market than professional DJ's.
Flight simulator on an 8086... If you flew the plane over 65536 feet, you'd come up through the ground again.
Nothing surpasses the true sound of analog vinyl ! Get the best of both worlds with final scrach http://www.finalscratch.com
This package includes digitally encoded vinyl that sends the signal to your laptop running Linux/Mac OS, and synchronizes your mp3 with the vinyl. It then sends it back into the mixer for mixing.
Coolest toy I have played with in awhile, and it still keeps my sound clean and bad ass playing thru any pair of technic 1200's
Most of the big name DJ's I've seen rarely if ever bother to scratch. These DJ's are not concerned with such, instead they are concerned with creating a smooth flowing stream of music by engaging in the arts such as beat mixing, volume matching, etc.
I suggest looking on kazaa/usenet/etc for videos of any of the following DJ's in action, and one will easily see they are nothing like the american stereotype DJ. (Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Timo Mass, Paul Van Dyk, etc)
Sunny Dubey
PS: I'm not saying all american DJ's are crap. We've got some good ones like Sandra Collins, Mark Farina, Danny Tenaglia, and such.
This isn't even close to being what a DJ (pro or amature) would want. It's really more of a toy. Only now are we seeing CD tables - like the Pioneer DJM-1000 that are high enough quality to be considered worthy of using. 90% of DJs are still into vinyl. And before anyone says anything about how they are living in the past or whatever - there are several reasons for that. You still have greater control over vinyl - you can touch it and move it exactly how you want, other systems have to simulate that. Also, ALMOST ALL GOOD DANCE MUSIC COMES OUT ON VINYL ONLY!! Go to www.dancerecords.com or www.satelliterecords.com, and see exactly how many tracks are available on anything other than vinyl. Yeah, if you are spinning Top 40 right off the cd you got at BestBuy, or in this case the MP3 you downloaded from iTunes or wherever, and you aren't trying to do anything advanced, then maybe something like this could be a fun diversion. But if you are trying to mix interesting, unique music you are still going to use vinyl. But again, this just doesnt have anywhere NEAR the functionality that a DJ would want. They would be better off to buy two cheap tables and a cheap mixer off of ebay than to try to use this thing. And yes, even amatures usually have 2 1200s and a stack of vinyl.
They don't do Mac?!?!?
They really aren't going to be taken seriously in the DJ world until the release a product that is compatible with Macintosh laptops. I don't know a single DJ who uses a laptop running anything besides MacOS.
I know Mac OS X has trouble with 5.1 sound, but I would think you could get it without too much work by bypassing the normal soundcard. Hell, if it worked well enough DJs would use it instead of their soundcard for digital output. Plus if they had a Mac version they could do away with USB and the audio compression that is necessary to use that transfer method and go straight to firewire.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
and it's unneccessarily difficult
Vinyl is much, much easier to work with that CDs or any other type of digital format. On a record, you can see the changes in the track by the variations in the groove pattern. This makes it easier to find your cue point and know when the breakdowns and other changes are coming up. It also makes beatmatching and cueing easier as you can manipulate the actual movement of the record and not just a 'play' button and some stationary jog wheel (though there are CD players that try to emulate the rotation of a record.)
The only digital media that seems to come close to vinyl is Staton's Final Scratch which I have yet to try.
"To keep things honest, and unbiased, the DJ Console does have one minor flaw, there is a bit of latency between button push, and software response. Though, this is somewhat expected due to the Consoles USB 1.1 connection to the computer. The resident HH DJ (yours truly), was having a few issues timing his beat matching/scratch/etc due to being accustom to the instantaneous response of actual DJ Equipment and traditional turn-table. All in all, we did learn to compensate for the delay in response and we were back to having fun with the equipment in short time. One question can only be raised here however, as to why a USB 2.0 interface was not implemented during the design process of this console.
Heh, a musical instrument with a latency issue. Oh yes, sure, Pros are going to stock up on these things. Not bloody likely.
Anyway, how's this news? There's like a hundred gimmicy little audio things you can hook up to your PC. Is tomorrow's headline going to be about one of those electronic midi guitars with the plastic strings? I can see the headline now "Yamaha introduces new electronic guitar, Jimmy Page surrenders".. Wait a sec, that's a Fark headline! It's a trap! NSFW!
USB 1.1 on that thing reduces it from a toy to trash, IMO.
"Boo" to the guy who wrote the article, as well. There were no performance benchmarks to demonstrate whether the card impacts frame rates when compared to other audio solutions. That's what I looked at when I bought my last card, I didn't want to go to the trouble of over-clocking my system just to have the wrong accessories eat up whatever FPS gains I picked up.
Final thought on this review:
Moving on to the next series of tests we listened to a various mixture of high bitrate Mp3's ( > 192kps) and audio CD's that spanned various spectrums of musical styles. Initial we tossed in Crystal Method's Tweekend CD due to its great sound range.
WTF? Crystal Method's music has no sound staging or real depth to it. It's just a bunch of clicks and whistles for the raver kids. How about getting out something with real instruments and natural sounds next time, foo. Samples of resampled bits of music with a punchy bass sound ain't depth unless you are 14 and dream about having a car with a big stereo so you can be like the guys in The Fast and the Furious.. And get that glowstick pacifier thingy out of your mouth, dumbass.
Peace out
Here's a basic history of rap as I, a 30 year-old white guy, know it:
Modern rap goes back to NYC in the late 70's. "Rapper's Delight" by the Sugar Hill Gang dates back to then. Also, around the same time, DJ Kool Herc was the first guy known to use two turntables to cut seamlessly back and forth between songs.
Things picked up in the early to mid 80's, when we saw NYC-based acts like L.L. Cool J, Public Enemy, and Run-DMC. The Beastie Boys became the first white rappers to hit it big. Rap crossed over to young, white America (the MTV generation) mostly thanks to Run-DMC collaborating with Aerosmith on the remake of "Walk This Way" in 1986. Most pre-1988 rap was innocent (and mostly clean) braggadocio of the "I'm cooler than you [and here's why]" variety.
In the late 80's and early 90's, gangsta rap got big with acts like Ice-T, Eazy-E and N.W.A., and later Snoop Doggy Dogg, who were actually gang members/criminals, whose violent lyrics raised the ire of older whitebread America. It was around this time that the whole east coast rapper vs. west coast rapper war broke out. At the same time, Vanilla Ice gave white rappers a bad name.
Around 1994 I felt that most new rap that was coming out was shit, so it is at this point that my history gets sketchy. In the late 90's there was essentially a cavalcade of mush-mouthed, lowlife bastards like Notorious B.I.G., DMX, Ja Rule, 50-Cent, Busta Rhymes, etc, whose already-incoherent words were further drowned out by overly-thunderous bass. Oh, and Tupac, who became quite prolific and released more albums after he was dead than he did while alive. Videos became nothing but pissing contests to see who could squeeze the most whorish-looking women and the most garish Cadillac Escalades into a few minutes of video. The music became secondary because every fucking rapper on the planet was too busy trying to do movies. It was also around this time that we got the highly-annoying Eminem. Oh, and let's not forget shitty rap-rock acts like Kid Rock, Limp Bizkit, etc. Yuck.
My iPod has about 400 rap/hip-hop songs on it, and very damn few of them are dated after 1995-- but I still listen to and enjoy almost everything that came before.
I am curious... anybody that has said "90% of all DJs" and "No DJ will..". How many of you are actually paid worknig mobile disc jockeys? I am. The group I work has 6 shows. And all 6 of them are CD ONLY - No Vinyl. Every DJ I know went to CD and got away from Vinyl as soon as possible. The weight alone is the major benefit, not to mention countless others. Scratching? I don't know of any PAID DJ that still does it, and I have never had a client that said "please scratch" at any paying gig. I am sure that there are some parties that might want it. But not from a mainstream mobile disc jockey show. FYI... I am the first DJ in our group to take the entire CD setup and RIP it to MP3. I am now experimenting with PC DJ and DSS to see how good I can get beat mixing with MP3s only. I have found I can do it with just a basic PC and soundcard, and the sound quality is great. Remember: Most paying clients don't want scratching or the highest quality sounds. They want their requests to be played and the DJ to show up on time and keep the crowd entertained. Most of them don't even care if you beat mix or not.
"Action is the thing that escapes most people. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great actions are few and far in between.
From the post I'm guessing you do events like weddings and such, I think there's a big difference between event DJ's and club/rave djs
they are completely different and need different hardware, regular djs never need to beatmatch or change pitch,
whereas club djs have to have complete control of the sound, that's why final scratch is amazing, and this hardware will be passed off as lame.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
Maybe it's just me but; isn't this product all wrong.
Problem #1 PC only.
At a time when Mac OSX and Linux have some of the lowest audio Latencies in the industry; and when there is so much more exitement on those platforms what is this company thinking making standard based hardware not platform independent?
Problem #2
Why USB and No Firewire (ieee1394).
Newsflasch Hercules, the industry trend for MP3 music is.... iPod and iTunes, mac or pc.
You can't make a new DJ product that can't control an iPod.
That is just suicide.
All it would take for this product to be forgotten, is someone else to intro a firewire based controler that can connect to one or 2 iPods.
This would be the true killer application.
You have to ride on market successes.
Nothing like this works in a Vacuum.
I saw this on slashdot and I was so excited until I realized what it was. so so oh hum.
Problem #3.
DJ software What *%@#$!!!
Why does it need to connect to DJ software.
It should manage on it's own.
This needs to be able to access and control MP3s and manipulate them the way that a mixer controls sound out of turntables.
Have 2 or more sound sources (MP3s) cue them, play/pause them, pitch shift them, beat match, etc, From the console.
use a simple interface to load all MP3s from whatever platform or external drive, and allow the console to do it's work internally. not in the host cpu.
(this would enable it to control iPods and a bunch of other sound sources.)
hugh....
More poor planing and design.
Typical of Vacuum designed products.
Get with it.
Content + Container; Content = Container; Content â Container... which is the question?