Super Stereo DN78 Rotary DJ Mixer

0:00 DN78 from Super Stereo, I want

Alright guys, before we have a look at the DN78 from Super Stereo, I want to talk to you a little bit about what will be happening in the future. For DJs, what will be happening in the future? For kit, what is going to happen? How kit is going to change? Now, technology is moving incredibly fast. If we go back to 2005, 2004-2005, mini SD card, 128 megabytes. Wow! The technology was amazing because you could get 120 meg on something that you could fit on your fingernail. Now it's 128 gigabytes which is mental. Possibly in two or three years when people are hopefully still watching this video they'll be thinking, only 128? It's now 555 million on something the size of a flea. Who knows? But technology is moving in leaps and bounds. Now let's go back a little bit to how technology used to be in the 70s. It was big, bold and brash.

2:22 Yes, it's that kind of feel but with a modern day twist

It was organic, it was earthy, it was knobs and dials, and also it was analogue. Right, so what Super Stereo have done, and I believe this is how the future will be, is they've taken the beauty, the feel, the vibe from old school technology and brought it up to date. Now, this mixer here... If this was a person, if this was someone who is meeting your in-laws for the first time, it would be a very charming young man or young lady walking in in a lovely waistcoat, a beautiful like nice warm jacket and woolly jumper. They'd be well shaven, well dressed, smell good, walk in pristine condition, kiss everyone's hand. Bring in a bottle of wine and sit there and smile, and every single person would fall in love with them because they epitomise beauty and how everyone would want to be. Now that's what has happened with this mixer. It's got everything you need but at the same time it's kept the earthy kind of tranquility from the 70s.

I'm picturing being on a beach with a pina colada, the waves lapping against my feet and all of a sudden seeing some strange white car come through the water reminiscent of James Bond movie. Yes, it's that kind of feel but with a modern day twist. So I'd be on the beach drinking my pina colada The car would come out of the water, James Bond would jump out of it but he would have a minute little thing about that big and that would be his mobile phone where he could talk to someone on Mars. So let's have a look at this mixer all right now I've got a track here you must be familiar with this by now Mr Lenny Fontana Beautiful cut. If you want any info on this track, check out Karmic Power Records. I'll put a link in the description. I will also put a link in the description to Super Stereo, the website and this mixer as well. Okay, so... Right. Now this is going to be my first sort of... It's sort of a review, but it's more showing some of the functions. So let's just turn that down. Okay, so what have we got? We have got...

4:51 Bass high, gain control, output

A valve mixer. Now, if you're not familiar with valves and what they are, well, they are, if we go back to say the 70s, they almost held the power, they held the energy, they held the soul of... Old school amplifiers. There were valves in practically everything from your radio to your television and quite often when you press the button to start something it didn't just turn on and there was it, that was it. It had to warm up. So I'm going to take that word warm and emphasise that by having warmth with the sound that you get from this mixer. Now channel one, channel two. Two channels but you've got inputs so or four inputs at the back so what you can do if you want to you can go from phono or you can go line now at the back of the mixer as well there's a couple of switches so for example if you're plugged into phono and you want to quickly switch to line you can do so but of course phono is for vinyl

Turntables. Line-in can be your DAT player if you're old school, your CD player, your iPod for example. Alright, now I don't want to go too much into the features. I just want to explain a couple of fantastic, well, yeah, features on this mixer but I don't want to talk too much about the entire unit. I'm going to press play there. Okay, so dials for a start. You can see there's no up-faders, no down-faders. It's all rotary. So at the front of the mixer, we've got a gain control. Channel 1 has got a gain control. We've also then got bass, mid and high for the overall output. And we've got bass, mid and high for the channel as well. So just think of the potential. Turn the bass off here, okay? To minimum.

7:25 This is analog, you know, it's not digital

Same here, mid and high. Now on the bass, mid and high on each channel you're just reducing the DB but on the output you're completely removing the sound so you have complete cut. And again crossfade is a rotary crossfade. You've got your very basic cue here, booth control Headphones and pretty much exactly the same, well it is exactly the same on the right hand side. Now you've got no fantastic LEDs for your output, you've got meters showing you the output as it should be. And I don't know if you can see here but I'm really having to turn that up actually to get anything out of it. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn this speaker down. Because this is a very, very powerful speaker. It's the KLA-12 series from QSC, it's the Line Array and that's pretty much too loud for this room, just one of them. Okay, so what we've got with this mixer is we've got sort of like a warm kind of sound. This is analog, you know, it's not digital. So, right.

Let's talk a little bit about analogue and digital. Now, again, I am no expert, believe me, by far I am no expert, but to give you an easy explanation of analogue and digital is like this. Now let's imagine that... I'll give you an analogy. Let's imagine that you go to a cake shop and you want to buy a sponge. And a sponge cake is flour, eggs, sugar And butter, margarine. That's pretty much it. Now that's your analogue because that's what it should be. Maybe a little bit of vanilla essence. Nothing else. Now your digital is where you've still got the same ingredients but they start to mess it around and change things in it and like throw things in and take things out and all of a sudden they'll...

Change the overall feel of the flower and maybe they'll mush up the margarine or maybe they'll, I don't know, maybe like throw extra eggs in, take a bit of the albumin or whatever it's called out of the egg. So what they're doing is you're still having a sponge but it's not how it was when you put it in, when you put the ingredients in. You're getting something completely, not different out, The mix is slightly different, the cake will be different. Now that's what happens with sound. Analog is analog, it's how it was made. All that happens is you will have the amplified original sound on how it was made. Digital, they'll bring it in, they'll twist it, they'll turn it, they'll peak it, they'll trough it, they'll do different things with it so you'll still get the sound but it's digitalized. This is not, this is old school, this is original.

10:54 Vinyl

What we're dealing with, what we've got here is we have got old school features that's up to date with modern day technology. Now this guy here is handmade in the UK. It's a stunning piece of kit. It's fine for mobile, for club, for radio DJs and some nutter like myself who is going to be doing a lot of demos and tutorials on it. Alright so, I mean at the moment I've got it plugged into... A CDJ. So, I've got a digital sound going into an analog mixer. Now, I've used this player a lot. I've used the sound system quite a bit. I haven't used this mixer much and already I can hear a definite difference even though I'm playing a digital sound. I'm playing something digital and it's crazy. Earlier on I did a video and I used vinyl and there was a definite warmth to the sound. Now again, with high on your channel and high on the output as well, it means you can enhance the highs even more if you want to. So I don't know if you can hear this. Turn that up a little bit. There. Bass is bright. That is very bright. Okay, let's just have another closer look.

DN78, now this isn't cheap but it's like anything you pay for what you get. Alright so I'm going to be doing a lot more on this mixer over the next goodness knows how long if not forever to be quite honest. I'm going to be using it with CD players, with vinyl turntables, with vinyl and CD. You will see this on the road at gigs with me as well. So again, if you want any more information on the mixer, check out the link in the description. Also on the track from Karmic Power Records, practice and enjoy. Thank you very much.

This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.