A couple of days ago Roland launched it's new DJ-505 and DJ-202 controllers and I could not be more excited about it! As a little background, I've been a career DJ in Chicago, Illinois for the last 5 years. It's my only source of incomes so I do a lot of bar gigs at a lot of different places as well as the occasional club or wedding. I live in bucktown and I take public transit to all my gigs and often times this involves either walking or standing around. I'm not taking vinyl, CDJs, or even a hard flightcase out because it's just way too big and bulky. The DDJ-SX and SZ are both good pieces of travel equipment that are large but not completely overbearing but even still another problem comes into play, booth size. Here in these Chicago bars, DJ boths can be any size, shape thrown together everyway you can imagine. You might have to climb a ladder, you might be on the table next to the outlet. You might have a booth that was cut in half to make more room for the waitress station or in a little box square in the middle of the bar so you need a controller that can fit any booth. Keep in mind your DJ booth is prime location for any in bar entertainment wether that's the TV station, the computer with pandora streaming, or even the mop bucket there is probably going to be another use for that space that other than DJing.
Now let's breakdown the specs that I think will set the DJ-505 ahead of the Pioneer DDJ-SR. Understand this isn't club gear. Many bars have club gear and proper booths, set up your serato box and go. This isn't trying to compete with that. The DJ-808 is a very solid piece of equipment a friend of mine now uses one of those instead of his DDJ-SX2 he liked the quality sound and feel and the sequencer up top can do wonders for adding a beat to songs that really lack it. He does complain about it's size though it's a very tight fit in some of the more cramped booths so shrinking it down to the two channel size make's this a real ideal piece in any DJ booth.
Now let's look at something that should have been a must for the DDJ-SR and wasn't.
Below is the back of the Pioneer DDJ-SR
And now the Roland DJ-505
I know the SR has the price point by a couple hundred dollars but look at the functionality you're losing. You can run independent channel lines, you can't run xlr out, but most importantly, no option for an independent power supply on the DDJ-SR. Any working DJ who's playing all night doing video sets for hours knows the value of keeping your system running and the music playing. This setup not only keeps your whole controller from sucking power from the USB port on your laptop. On top of that in the event of a serato crash you can run your phone and an aux chord to keep the music playing even while you restart.
There's a lot of power in this smaller package that I think could be a working DJ power house. Sweetwater has the 505 teased at $699 which vs. the $599 for the SR. If the quality is close to that of the DJ-808 then I think this will definitely be my next controller purchase.
Donations are always dope and appreciated but I do it cause I love the jamz!
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