In a rash of budget gear announcements here at the BPM Show, Numark has announced the NDX500 media player and DJ controller. It is a CD player (audio/MP3) that also works with music on USB flash drives and on your computer, and it also has Midi capability, making it a highly friendly device for digital DJs using software who want to play CDs and USB music too.
Thanks to its built-in sound card and Midi control capabilities, including a provided mapping for Serato DJ software, it is possible to control Serato DJ out of the box with the NDX500, so a pair of these units coupled with a basic hardware DJ mixer would give you a hybrid analogue/digital set-up. This is something that will appeal to DJs coming to digital from the CD world who don’t want to give up that capability, or to DJs who would simply prefer to use traditional-style equipment.
The unit has three hot cues, an auto BPM with tap override, a scratch/search wheel, master tempo, and start/stop time adjustment for vinyl-style braking, plus a basic in-built display for track info etc, (although it is likely that this doesn’t port track info over from Serato DJ when the unit is in use as a software controller and sound card).
Priced at $249 per unit, two such units plus a basic mixer could easily be had for under $600, which is less than the price of many software-only DJ controllers, albeit you’d have to factor in software purchase too (around $130 in the case of Serato DJ).
• The NDX500 will be available imminently.
Does the low price of units like this tempt you to go down this route rather than buy a DJ controller to use with your laptop and software?
Phil Morse
