Ok, just bought the Numark HDmix from westend DJ, complete with the numark flightcase and illuminated keyboard.

My usual set up is denon 4000 players and numark d2 controller, coupled to a Denon x500 mixer.
Im not going to do a comparison speech, because both set ups have plus and minus features.

The denon mixer for example has much more functionality than the HDMIX mixer, however this aint a big enough argument point (for me) to stop me buying the HDMIX.

I love the idea of walking into a venue with a small flightcase housing the HDMIX, complete with mixer, CD player, hard drive and illuminated search keyboard underneath on a slide out rack.

http://www.numark.com/hdmix

http://www.numark.com/hdmixcase

Pro's and cons........

Obviously the size of the unit is brilliant. Its neat, compact and looks great! The cool blue buttons and light up cue buttons are very sylish. The liquid crystal led level meters look good and those who like the pretty lights will be made up! However the LED meters are hard to see EXACTLY on the 0db level marker because the lights tend to bleed over a little giving you a less accurate level reading. Im sure I will get used to this though. It should be near enough

All in one fuctionality appeals to me -as stated above. The built in 80 gig HD is enough for most of your main music. The hard drive connects straight to your lap top for direct access to either the lap top drive or transfer betwen. As I write this, Im running my music folders through the supplied Numark Librarian software that caculates the BPM and seek tables onto the drive. It also allows you to make profiles for each track so that you can visually see "peaks" etc on the display for exact cueing. However this for me is a gimmick, as I cue from sound not visually.

The librarian process is a one off, once your music has been through this software, you never need to do it again unless hard drive failure happens. The process is a MUST for all users really. It allows the tracks to be loaded in a second, rather than 6/7 seconds without the software.

I have the D2 as well, on my other set up... The HDMIX is faster for search and load than the discontinued D2. It also benefits having a colour hi definition screen, thats easy to see and large enough for all the information.

The unit comes with a "demo mode" which I think is loaded onto the internal hard drive. It basically allows the lights to flash around when not in use, and maked the screen come up in demo mode pictures and instructions. Think i will delete this off the drive, the flashing lights can do your head in after a while... some may like them though.

Easy to use is an understatement! Its so simple anyone can use it. No complicated proceedures, just switch on.... access your hard disk or CD and load the tracks into player 1 or player 2 or "crate" them for use later on. Same as the D2 exactly really, but faster!

The players dont compare to the high end players on the market, with the lack of hot starts etc. However the unit does have key lock and loop in / loop out facilitys. which my 4000 only has anyway. SO im used to DJing without some extra features.

But then again...Im not a night club DJ! I do weddings and 40ths and 30ths bla bla ... do i need all the extra functions? NO!

You can mix perfectly well with the players here, but just not too creative!

This unit hasnt been designed to meet the top CD player, its been designed to have an all in one solution to stop the back ache and set up times!

Its my belief that DJing should be fun, after all thats why we do it apart from the money too. But whats the fun in hours of set up and de-set up times? I can be out of the venue in 15 mins now, packed in the van and away home! quicker than most DJ's have their lights de-rigged! lol

Theirs nothing worse than knowing you have a huge pack away job coming to you at the end of a tiring night.

Two reasons I went for the MIX. Firstly the reasons above, and secondly... I do more and more walk in venues now, I can take the HDMIX and plug it straight into the venues amps and away I go! I couldnt possibly take the big rack I have, along to these venues.

The sound quality is no different from the denon mixer, running through my matrix amps. The mixer section is not as good as the denon, with the lack of assignable faders, but as long as your happy with the faders as they are, its ok! My only gripe is that I would have preferred my Laptop "channel" to be on my far right, but the players have dedicated channels on numbers 2 and 3 thus stopping your laptop being on 3 (far right) But I will get used to it. The pro's outweigh the cons, just in size, weight and set up time.

Not yet gigged with the HDMIX, so I will add onto the review in the next few weeks with a honest review of the sound quality at the venue "full on" But I suspect that the numark mixer has been designed well, and it all feels good to the fingers. The sliders are soft and steady, and the cue buttons are clear and light up brightly in cool blue. The player buttons are the same as the D2 which I like anyway... not rubberised, just a metalic feel.

No latency or loading blips so far, probably because I have run the librarian software..

All in all i'm really pleased so far... Just the price tag! I expect to see it fall somewhat in the coming months, but nobody is doing this unit yet for less than £899 (SO FAR)

But add up a mixer, a hard drive, a cd player and 2 MP3 controllers.... cant be far off the same money but wont look as good?

The unit has programmable pitch faders from 6 percent upwards, also has crossfader auto starts if required.

Has built in beat counter and a visual guide too, however I use "sound only" to beat mix, dont really follow the lights on the panel.

The player will auto play from one side to the other... But could do with an update to include auto fader in/out on this function.

More to come soon


Jeff

Thanks for the review Jeff,
I'm a DDS80 owner so also use the librarian, and most of the functionality is shared.

How do you get on with adding new music? My DDS is in a flightcase, so its a bit of hassle (my best solution is a USB extension, plugged into a normal A-B cable for the Drive bay)
I know your drive bay is integrated (mine is separate, but I guess both are USB drives)

If you get many music files, you can partition the HDD and put "now cd's" on one (with their own library) and the rest on another partition (with its own library)

With many tracks (8000+) it does take a while to run.


I'm also pleased with mine - the HDMix was out of my price range at the time, but looks great.

Jason

The flight case has a small hole in the back for connecting the XLR's etc. Ive jst hooked the unit up to my lap top and transferred the music to its hard drive. Adding music should be a doddle.

Finding the search very fast... With the keyboard. Just press F1 (search) chuck "abba" in and it comes up with all the abba crap lol

However the way you organise the hard drive folders matters greatly with speed. Keeping it simple... All the now albums for example maybe should be "peeled back" to all the songs on the albums in one big folder called "now music" maybe?

The more folders within folders, the more work you have to do.

Jeff

The system uses the open source "sqlite3" database engine- so directories shouldn't matter to the system as there is a table of files, with their locations. It might take the librarian longer to index the files, but searching on a gig is still fairly fast.

I've converted the library database to mySQL and can offer a music search on my site, if you have mySQL database (and php) on your site, I'll be happy to share the code.

If you're interested in what information is stored in the database;
http://www.sqliteexpert.com/download.html
Get the free version, and open one of the files in the .librarian folder (use a copy of the folder)

I can't remember which file is the "good" one, but you should find a list of songs/artists/titles etc

Cheers,
Jason

Nice one Jeff. My D2 is 2 years old and NEVER let me down, BUT the searching is very slow and the opposite deck to the playing deck "holds on" to the previous track for around 8 seconds. Some tracks take an eternity to load to even after I have rebuilt the library and updated the firmware (and over 3 hard drives!).

That aside, the HDMIX has been on my wishlist for around a year now. Plenty of cash in the bank for the purchase BUT I need to be swayed with that £1K price tag!!!

Let us know how your first gig goes with it.

I think perhaps if it comes down in price... I'll be sick!! But I needed this unit... I do weddings with my rack system denon mixer and cd players etc.... But i needed an all in one unit that I could just pick up (like a small suit case) and arrive at my walk in gigs........ plug into their amps and away I go!

Ive said NO to quite a few upstairs venues just because of the trouble with hauling the rack upstairs (when no lift) also Ive struggled with my Lap top and gigaport sound card lately...... Using a well known software, crashed twice during a party I was doing! Had to revert to WINAMP to get through the night!

Ok its maybe vista, laptop, software? Who knows... But I could not aford this happening to me again. Was really embarrassed. It was at a walk-in Job I do quite often.

80 percent of my gigs - I will use the rack set up / denons etc But even for the 20 percent walk in/upstairs gigs it was worth buying this kit.

Was thinking of the Denon 2500 along with OTS, but again... if laptop crashes, restarting can be a nightmare.
This set up is purely computer based, and I felt I needed to steer away from relying on one laptop for these 20 percent of my gigs mentioned above

The HDMIX has dedicated MP3 players and lap top input (how ive set it up) also has the CD player too... and the mixer is good enough, maybe no denon, but good enough

Jeff

Ive said NO

The blue led lights in my decking are better, however am sure you new newmark is better than the position of my outside flood light!

well..... what can I say? the customer wanted it their, so got it their lol

For those who are thinking eh????

Did a job for steve (another freebee) put some cool blue decking lights in his decking,and installed a floodlight on his house back wall... his missus came home and ....................

its in the wrong place haha

women eh!!

I feel your pain! I've just cut down my rig by about 15kgs as it was killing me. No CD decks for me anymore, laptop and HD2500 controller all the way.

well.after doing my review saying how the HDMIX was decent fast and just what i was looking for..... its going back to Westend DJ this week!

My review was based on playing with the unit without the main PA and amps linked up, just through headphones and general messing about with the hard drive players etc.

Today I linked it up to my amps.. and a coulple of speakers for the first time

I noticed even when the channel faders were right down, I could hear the music track still playing very distortedly through my speakers... So I turned down the master volume and STILL could hear the thud of the beat through the speakers (and a lot of hiss/white noise sort of thing)

How can a mixer produce a signal even when both channel fader and master volume is off???

The signal was small, I got rid of it only by either stopping the MP3 player, or turning amps down to half way...... no good coz this didnt allow me to create the volume i need on the bigger gigs.

To add onto this, I pressed the MIC button (without a mic even being attached) and a high pitched electronic noise was heard through the speakers, again with mic fader at zero! was small, but noticable!

So opinions are now....... NUMARK you've just lost a sale and confirmed that your mixer on the HDMIX is rubbish!!

phoned westend DJ, they told me that they will refund the money and sort out collection this week.

really disappointed, was just what I was looking for in regard to size and funtionality.

Ive still got the big set up rack with x500 and DN4000 players, plus a D2 attached as well, so will be using this as usual, but for walk in jobs i'm gunna have to think again now i reckon.

It confirms that this unit is really NOT worth 900 quid!! And to try and match the line levels with the cool looking led blue level meters is really hard i noticed too!

Shame coz the concept is great, they just havent put enough quality into the mixer section, even though the MP3 players are great.



Dave what software you using with the 2500?

Standalone. The laptop is for searching for songs and backup.



I have the HD2500 and X500 in a case from Thomann. The 10u LIVE is deep enough. The keyboard is a keysonic and is the smallest I could find. It eliminates the need for a keyboard drawer thus reducing the weight further. It's not light, 20kgs ish in total, I would imagine, but I would have no problem carrying it upstairs in one hand.

Surprised!

Could it just be a faulty one?

possibly, but ive asked for my money back. They said they will test it in the shop first before refunding!

I reckon its a design flaw, but could be wrong

Please let us know what they say, I hope its just a bad one. I was about to pull the trigger then saw this thread and the problems you had.

Hey did you hear anything back from them?

yeah sorry ive not posted on this.... Yes WestendDJ have refunded the money after testing it in the shop, they agree it was faulty... another person said, its simply not worth the money at 900 quid when you can get the denon x500 and 2500 for less!

So thats what ive done, got my self another x500 mixer, and the 2500 HD player

Getting to grips with the 2500 at the moment... I will say the concept and simplicity of the Numark DDS 80/HD MIX was brill, based on the director of course! Lacks the functions of the 2500, however I think its a lot more user friendly and easier to see the screen than the 2500.

overall the 2500 is a far more quality unit in most aspects, but I still own the D2 and love using that too.

So ive got 2 set ups now.....

1 - x500, 2500, bu4500, all in a wheely flight-case with an table attached (by using the lid)

2 - x500 and D2 just for my walk-in jobs and upstairs funtions

happy days!

HI Jason,

I'm thinking about getting the HDMIX or the DDS 80. While I'm mulling that over, I was also thinking about putting my music library online so customers could search through it and saw your offer for the code to do so. Would you be willing to send it to me? You can email it to "aaflyguy at gmail dot com"

I have the ability to create databases on my webhost so it shouldn't be a problem for me to integrate (I hope.) I am kind of comfortable creating the database since I've had to do that several times for WordPress installations. I just don't know much about php so can't create my own script for the database. That's where your code comes in :-)

Thanks.

Michael

Hi Michael,
I'll roll it up tonight.
There are few parts to it;

1. SQLite3 and simple script to take the main database and convert to SQL INSERT commands. I'm currently only using Artist+Song Title.

2. You'll manually send this to your database (mySQLadmin or other SQL tool) I personally use;
SQLyog from http://www.webyog.com/en/

3. Simple AJAX lib (this updates the <div> on your site).

4. Simple HTML form, with JS event code. Also a <div> as a holder for the results.

5. PHP code+connection to DB


Jason

Through looking about I did note that the replacement for the numark director is out there......

very much in the same vein as HDMix and DDS80....


take a look

Numark DDS


if anyone has one - has seen one etc - i would love to hear about it

(image link from HTFR)

Apart from having a colour screen and more powerful processor this isn't that much different to the D2 Director is it?

I've got one (DDS80), but have never used the D2

The colour screen is good, and fairly easy to read- its fairly high-resolution (unlike the Denon, which is mono and low-res)
The main unit (DDS) has 3 USB ports (2 at the rear, one on the front).
You can use most FAT32 formatted devices, and it also works with Partitioned drives.
You can use a USB keyboard to navigate tracks, with a text search on most fields.

There is a "crate" facility, where you can place tracks for playback later.

Downers....
-No effects
-The Librarian tool is fairly slow when you get many tracks- this tool is used to add tracks to the system
-You can't appear to play a play list continually (you can do this on the crate though)
-When wearing a suit/tux, I've found the cuffs can knock the jog wheels... Grrr

Bluejools - if you're close to my area (waltham cross), you'll be free to pop over one night for a play.