I’ve had a pair of CDJ-400s now for a couple of days and this is the first hands-on review. Pioneer had some delivery difficulties due to big amount of orders and I had to wait for the players for some weeks.
It’s funny that the change from vinyl to CD took really long and wasn’t an easy step, but leaving CDs behind and going 100% digital feels very comfortable. And the change has been very, very fast.
For now, I haven’t put a single CD inside the CDJ-400s. When I got the package, the first thing to do was to insert the USB sticks and try them out. I tested the players with an old 512mb stick and a new 2gb stick. The device reads the sticks very fast and the playback goes without any problems. You can browse the content of sticks while playing them and easily browse them by ID3 tags (album, artist, trackname).
The screen font size is very big. With a smaller font it would’ve been easier to show longer track names completely. This would be a needed feature especially if you’re having several remixes of one track and you’re seeing only the beginning of the track’s name.
If you’re familiar with Pioneer CDJs, there are not many things for which manual would be needed. However, finding out how to set an automatic loop wasn’t that easy and I ended up browsing the manual. The looping is fast and you can create nice looping effects easily. Entertaining.
The different jog wheel illuminations are a cool feature and I’m definitely going to take the most out of the MIDI features in the near future. The build-in effects feel totally unnecessary, even the much hyped vinyl/scratch effects.
Then, how about the jog wheel feel? I wouldn’t compare the wheel with CDJ-100 (or with CDJ-200, which I deeply hate), but rather with CDJ-800 or CDJ-1000. I would say the feel is closer to CDJ-1000 than CDJ-800. It’s very nice to play and the pitch bending goes without any problems. For scratching the wheel feels a bit too small, at least at first.
All-in-all, I’m very happy of my CDJ-400s. They don’t lack anything which I would have needed and I wouldn’t complain playing gigs with them. If you have any questions concerning the players, feel free to ask.
A couple of CDJ-400 links:
CDJ-400 image
CDJ-400 on Flickr
CDJ-400 on YouTube
CDJ-400 jog wheel illuminations
CDJ-400 review