Disco D played here saturday (and he REALLY tore it up, by the way) and we talked a bit about all this new DJ technology. He had a couple of things to say about Final Scratch and the new Pioneer decks:
1. You can't actually scratch on Final Scratch. At least not battle scratching. 2. He was impressed by the new Pioneer decks, except that the wheels don't spin. As an engineer I think there are some real problems with the whole final scratch paradigm. First and foremost, the vinyl disks are as vulnerable as 'real' records to wear and scratches. Even more so, since you presumably use the same 2 discs through your whole set. Someone who plays out with Final Scratch every night would put 100 times more wear on the poor things than they ever put on their records. I imagine that Hawtin and Aquaviva get whatever they need without paying for it, since they're official poster boys for the product. Then, there's the whole BEOS thing -- definitely a weak link. The reason they used BEOS is that when they began development it was the only way to get really low latency audio. Even as much as 10 milleseconds of latency is enough to throw a DJ off. Hell, having the monitors more than 5 feet away introduces enough latency to throw you off. If one were really going to do it right, you'd need a whole user interface -- dual spinning platters, cross fader, and pitch controls. What makes DJ-ing with vinyl such a natural gesture is the immediate tactile and auditory feedback. When you drag your finger on the label, you feel and hear the slowdown. When you rock the record over a beat, you hear it in your headphones with a negigible delay. That's why the people who developed Final Scratch spent several years developing it -- they couldn't improve on the paradigm.. Ultimately, though, it's way to expensive for most DJs, and I can't see it persisting in it's current form for very long. I don't know if people realize what a perceptual feat DJing is. Just getting two records well and truly matched is quite a trick. You can hear two records flamming as soon as they're 10 milleseconds apart. At 130 BPM, each 4 beat bar takes 1.846 seconds. If you match two records within a millesecond per bar, they'll start flamming within 10 bars, and trainwreck by 32 bars. That means DJs who can lock up two records are correcting tempo variations as small as .05 percent! That's one thing that always annoys me when I DJ with CDs -- the tempo slider resolution is way too coarse, and if you want to hold a mix you have to correct it every few measures. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
