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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.
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.
Well you'd think that 6 channels at 24 bit sounds good for under $250, but think about it -- a cheezy old SoundBlaster and a previous-generation multi-thousand dollar Apogee or ProTools rig are all based on 16-bit technology... but merely because this is so does not mean they will sound the same.
You get what you pay for. Be very careful when trying to define sound quality with bits and sampling rates alone. There are a lot more variables than that when it comes to digital audio hardware, many of them purely subjective.
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.
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.
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.