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Monthly Archives: March 2013

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UniqueSquared

UniqueSquared
March 30, 2013

My day with Vestax UK

There are many personal review websites out there for DJ gear (new and old), and for these guys that buy gear and put it to the test – we really owe them more than words.  It isn’t often that you can head into your local music shop and thoroughly examine a mixer fresh from the box.  Imagine if the sales rep actually let you open up the box of a new mixer, and plug it into some decks that had sitting out on the showroom floor.  They would never let you do that.  If you want to have a real good look at it, you need to buy it and take it home to dissect it.

It’s only when you have a name for yourself as a business or a reviewer website that a company will actually send you a free product to test out for yourself.  Even then, you …

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UniqueSquared

UniqueSquared
March 29, 2013

DJ Zeke: Performance video nailed

I’m not very surprised to see many professionals doing away with the traditional two turntable setup for something more modern and slimming.  What these guys have shown us is that new technology can be embraced and cleverly incorporated into old technology, and the turntables can continue to be a relevant thing, even in the age of digital controller and tablet devices.  Native Instruments did a wise job of lining up the correct artists to demo their gear.  First it was DJ craze, who managed to pull off a performance with two turntables and a NI controller (and this was before the Z2 was available).

Now, DJ Zeke is taking his shot at showing off what he can do with only a laptop and a single turntable.  Instead of a NI controller, he’s using the NI Z2 mixer, which houses multiple MIDI controlled buttons directly on the mixer itself.  He …

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UniqueSquared

UniqueSquared
March 29, 2013

Hot Hand USB Wireless MIDI Controller

There have been plenty attempts at exploring gesture control with MIDI controllers.  So far, we are still at a primitive state, where there are more experiments than products being produced with this in mind.  The QuNeo creator has naturally been looking for new ways to input gesture and have it decoded by MIDI software.  Other successive MIDI controller featured an expressive gesture control where the fingers could actually add movement to the sound of a note.  On the other side of the spectrum, hackers have been building detection software with three axes in order to track the motion of the hand or hands sin the air.  The trouble with this method is the amount of gear needed to pull it off – one company has put in all the hard work to create a device just like this.

The Hot Hand USB controller has a silly name, and it seems …

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UniqueSquared

UniqueSquared
March 29, 2013

Bowers & Wilkins Z2 iPod/iPhone Dock

Would any sensible buyer in their right mind spend a large chunk of cash on an iPhone speaker?  I’m not talking about those cheap twenty dollar portable speakers, I’m talking about those bedside docking stations where your iPhone charges.  You’ve seen them right – those oversized alarm clocks with towering speakers?  This is pretty much what I thought of them until I actually saw one put to good use.  It was a DJ friend of mine who had enabled them to receive wireless audio.  With that, he could DJ in his bedroom and the audio would be transmitted to any part of the house the speaker was rested.  It was a pretty cool deal.

The question is, how much is something like this worth?  Unfortunately, these units aren’t built cheap, even though they look relatively basic in design.  If Apple were to make a large one, it would cost nearly …

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UniqueSquared

UniqueSquared
March 29, 2013

V-Moda Vamp Verza

Portable digital audio devices are great for listening on the go, and even if you don’t like using one, you hardly have a choice in the matter.  What else are you going to use?  I suppose you could break out your old CD player and put that on, but do you really want to be caught dead using it?  This is sort of the trade of we get from shrinking down the sizes of hardware while advancing technology at the same time; something has to give.  As far as music is concerned, the quality of the audio is actually is what has been chopped due to innovation.

When you save a music file into iTunes and then onto your iPod or iPhone – the format of the song needs to be changed.  Apple uses their own format for digitally compressed audio, so you aren’t going to get good quality audio …