"It's so cool to have stereo equipment that doesn't look like it came from Circuit City," a friend said to me at a party as I played DJ, slowly sliding the fader to the right on my Vestax CDX-12M dual compact-disc player/mixer as a transgenre mutant-muzak mix of Psychic TV and the Beach Boys boomed from the speakers.
CD-DJ gear - which allows DJs to speed up and slow down playback to seamlessly match the beats of songs - has been on the turntablist scene for several years, but the Vestax CDX-12M is the only top-loading, two-deck player with a built-in mixer. Simply put, its style resembles a traditional DJ's rig - one variable-speed player on each side of a two-channel mixing console that also accepts a microphone or turntable inputs.
While more expensive pro CD players and mixers like those in Yamaha's CDJ series may boast more features, the Vestax wins hands down in elegance. Rather than attempt to mimic a turntable's hands-on-the-vinyl interface with a jog shuttle, the CDX-12M employs a joystick for scanning through tracks. It's true that searching back and forth yields a stutter rather than the smooth sound of the Yamaha decks, but a joystick does seem the most appropriate control for the digital DJ. After all, scratching is best left to old-school vinyl addicts.
And, not incidentally, my friend is absolutely right about the aesthetics of the machine. Forget about the boring matte-black metal-box design that's standard in consumer electronics. The Vestax is the most beautiful CD player on the market. Its green-teal metal hull and polished-wood front panel evoke memories of Macintosh tube amplifiers, artifacts from an era when stereos were furniture and being a disc jockey wasn't a postmodern pastime.
Vestax CDX-12M: US$1,350. Tracoman: +1 (954) 929 8999, on the Web at www.tracoman.com/.
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