The Lowdown
Reloop’s Stand Hub is an ingenious idea, putting a powered USB hub into a laptop stand. It’ll be a great fit for laptop DJs who have to plug lots of gear together at home or when out gigging. It’s expensive though, especially if you’re in the US.
Video Review
First Impressions / Setting up
The Stand Hub comes flat in a zipped black plastic carry bag, which has a smaller zipped internal pocket, which is where you can store the supplied cables – two very short cables (USB-C to USB-A and USB-C to USB-C), and a slightly longer USB-C to USB-A cable.
It has two small screw-in stoppers to prevent the laptop or tablet device slipping off the top platform, and comes with sticky-backed foam strips to attach to the laptop-holding legs, to avoid scratches and to hold the laptop firm.
It is pretty well made in metal; not as well made as the best-of-class DJ laptop stands, but it certainly seems sturdy enough. There are push-in spring loaded metal stoppers on the inner tubes of its design that align with holes cut out of the outer tubes for you to adjust the stand into all kinds of positions.
You can have the classic “C” or “Z” stand positions, and all kinds of weird and wonderful angles for using it with tablets and so on.
The real fun, though, is in setting up the hub part of it…
Plugging things into the hub
First, you attach your laptop. If you’re using a Mac, you use the USB-C to USB-C cable attached to the top USB-C socket on the left-hand upright (where all the power sockets are).
Then, you attach your laptop’s power lead to the bottom USB-C socket, and the blue LED comes on along with blue backlighting for the four USB-A sockets that are between the two USB-Cs.
Now you simply plug any other devices (media players, Midi controllers, Midi decks, your DJ controller, pad controllers, audio interfaces, your phone etc) into the four remaining USB-A sockets. The USB hub is powered by your laptop’s power supply, as is your laptop, all via the Stand Hub.
Note that if you’re using a computer that doesn’t have USB-C power (like many Windows computers), you’ll need to use your computer’s power supply straight to the computer as usual, and plug in an additional USB-C PD power supply (60W is recommended, Reloop sells one) to power the hub.
In Use
Two things really. Firstly, the laptop stand itself is great – elegant, sturdy, adjustable into all sorts of positions, and folds up nice and flat into its case for transport.
The other thing, of course, is the hub – and this is a revelation. It’s so simple and rather pleasing to finally have a clean and easy way of plugging in all kinds of USB equipment to your laptop without having an additional standalone powered hub, or trying to hack things with adaptors, or just having all that mess attached to an elevated laptop.
It just all worked as advertised, not much more to say.
Conclusion
If you can afford and have use for one, this is a good buy. It’s a simple idea, well executed. The stand is sturdy, the hub does the job perfectly.
Whether for quicker DJ changeovers, or for plugging in loads of USB-A gear to a USB-C laptop without buying a pile of replacement leads, or just for its advertised purpose of providing you with more reliable USB sockets, the Reloop Stand Hub is a winner.
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Even for Windows computers when you’ll still need an extra power supply, it’s a lot better than a standalone hub (the second, slightly longer USB-C to USB-A cable is for Windows computers where the USB-A socket may be on the right-hand side, by the way).
So: Better for Mac than Windows, better for Europeans than Americans due to the price being much higher stateside – but overall, a product we’re happy to recommend.
