Glorious Session Cube XL Workstation Review

Video Review

First Impressions / Setting up

The Session Cube XL from Glorious is a DJ workstation designed squarely for use in the home or maybe a small trendy bar-type setting. It’s stunning, stylish and unobtrusive – but is it practical and good value? We find out in this review.

The unit is supplied in two separate boxes, one containing the legs and one the top. While it looks amazing in black gloss, that is just the finish – inside it is hollow and of conventional mass-market furniture construction. That makes it quite light, and also turns out to be one of its advantages when it comes to cable storage (see later).

Putting it together is easy: Two long metal poles per “leg” hold the two legs and the top unit together, and are tightened with the supplied key; even a certified DIY-phobe like me managed it in a few minutes without drama.

You may want to experiment a bit stashing your cables into the hollow top surface; it’s easy enough to open the small lid to tuck your extension power cable inside, and there are three holes in the top for feeding audio and power cables up to your mixer, decks, controller and speakers (if you choose to place them on the unit as I did), but you’ll want to tweak things to get the right configuration.

For instance, in my case I decided to flip the unit 180 degrees because of where those holes were in relation to where I wanted to feed cables up to the Denon DJ Prime 4 that I tested it with.

It’s also worth noting that if you want to add a laptop onto the table, you may wish to invest in the separate aluminium/glass laptop stand that bolts to the main table; it’s hard to see how it would fit on otherwise.

If you choose not to do this, the four holes for attaching the laptop stand will be visible on the front of the unit (another reason for flipping it 180 degrees).

Your power cable feeds neatly out the unit from any of the four feet, and as you’ll see from my video, the whole set-up is exceedingly neat once finished.

The unit is supplied with LED strip lighting with a remote control; this was generic with no set-up instructions, so I decided not to add the lighting for this review.

In Use

So there are two people you almost certainly need to impress with a unit like this: yourself and your family.

Your family, I guess, will be impressed enough: As I say it’s neat, indeed it’s impressive, and as long as you have the space, it’ll look great in many a modern living room.

As far as you, the DJ, are concerned, again it does most things very well: It is the right height to prevent stooping when DJing, and thus is good news for your back, and the room on the top is enough for a controller and a pair of monitor speakers, or a pair of decks and a full-sized mixer.

If you’re using a laptop with it I’d definitely suggest buying the optional laptop stand, and the one usability thing that irked with me was that there was no obvious place to put my headphones; adding a small headphone hook yourself (maybe screwed into one of the unused laptop bolt holes in the case of the way I set it up) would solve that.

Conclusion

There are precious-few home DJ workstations available that look half decent and aren’t designer, thus with an accompanying designer price tag. This is one of them. It’s stylish, and the “open plan” look of it makes it far less obtrusive than some options out there.

Of course, that does mean you’ll have to keep your DJ area tidy, as there’s nowhere to plonk extra gear, boxes or bags of leads and accessories, piles of records and so on – but assuming you’re a minimal type of DJ or have other storage nearby for these types of things, I’d say for €499 the Glorious Session Cube XL is a winner.