Surprised today ( although not entirely ) bearing in mind that it's been out for only around 12 months in the UK, to see that the Numark D2 Director is now a discontinued product.

The replacement, the DDS80, has a control unit almost identical to the D2 but with a colour screen plus a separate rack mountable DVD drive and 80gb, upgradeable, hard drive in a similar configuration to the decks of a twin CD player.

Whilst the new unit is a logical progression, it would be helpful if the the 2 units become available separately for those who prefer to use their own standalone hard drives and, perhaps a separate twin CD player.

It is an absolute travesty. I love my D2 to bits BUT why O why have Numark opted to go for the smaller screen (even if it is colour) The text is too small !!!!!!!! (The reason I gave up with the Idj2). Shame cos like you say, it's the way forward.

Why were you not entirely surprised? (re: your bracketed text above)

I figured they would bring out a MkII version, but not so soon.

I guess this is it.

Although I have not done a like for like test/comparison, I figured that the Denon machine was probably more powerful than the Numark, bearing in mind the Denon's extra features.

I have since learnt that the new Numark unit will be USB 2.0 (as opposed to 1.1) and will have double the memory of the D2, allowing further future capabilities to be developed and incorporated.

However, with a RRP of £599 or thereabouts, the price advantage of the D2 has gone, since the Denon unit doesn't cost much more. The Denon doesn't have the extra DVD-ROM drive but that doesn't appeal to me anyway.

I don't like the idea of one control unit for both hard drives and CD drawers, not just from the point of view of back-up but also from the point of view of flexibility.

If the Numark DDS80 becomes available as separates it could appeal to a wider market, in my opinion.

I wonder if the unit can be used for VJ'ing as well with the addition of a dvd drive or is it just for adding music in mp3 form.

At the moment no and no. It does not have video capability and it's not possible to rip from the DVD-ROM drive to the onboard hard drive. The idea is that the head unit allows playback from that and additional drives and the DVD-ROM drive is there for playback of CDs, and mp3 CDs/DVDs.

However the main reason for having twice the flash memory and twice the RAM is to allow for future upgrades, so who knows?

i would love it to have karaoke capability us kj's get forgotten

Indeed, the finclusion of the DVD-ROM is quite bemusing as it's only for data/music files, not video - with no chance of an upgrade to video later, as you'd need a video out socket - unless someone pumps video out of a USB socket. So...DVD drives on the media add-on, only gives you a way of accessing 4.7gb of files - a feat which you can already do, using a £20 pen drive pushed into a USB port.



On the Denon DN-HD2500, you can of course run a set/pair of BU-4500 CD-drawer units. But, what a few people I've spoken to have done is bought the DN-D4500 CD-Decks instead, which are exactly the same drawer units as the BU-4500, but comes with te usual DN-D4500 Dual Control panel - so...if someone tipped a beer over your DN-HD2500, you just unplug the CD-Drawer control lead from the side of the 2500 and plug that lead into the DN-D4500 control unit, and hey presto, you've got full CD control back, to get you and your audience through to the end of the night.

The price of the D2 is coming down now so another possibility would be to have 2 x D2's and a pair of USB CD- orDVD-ROM drives. That way either head unit could control either the drives, hard drives or pen drives.