Throwback Thursday – The Cheap DJ Mixers That Built a Generation of Bedroom DJs

Everyone starts somewhere mediocre, and most of us started at the wrong end of an electronics shop. Mine was Tandy (Australia), which is what Maplin (UK) or Radio Shack (US) was to the rest of you. I walked past the rows of random resistors and the soldering kits and there, behind the glass, sat the Realistic 32-1200 Stereo Mixing Console. It was like shining down from the heavens. Here I was, in-front of an 80s slab of metal, most likely built for wedding singers and CB radio types, not for what I wanted to do with it, but it had faders and a price I could almost reach, so it became a DJ mixer by sheer force of teenage (and budget) could afford. I’m pretty sure it cost me AUD $220 at the time in 1993, with the current inflation, most likely $20 000

It was never meant for mixing records. The channels bled into each other, the whole thing was stiff out of the box, and the moment you pushed it hard it reminded you it was a home stereo component in a costume.I wrecked the shit of it anyway. Funny thing, after enough abuse the faders loosened up and started behaving like they had somewhere to be. Damage was a tuning method.

These were the icons of the bedroom DJ, the gear you actually owned rather than the gear you dreamed about. The Behringer DX626 turned up later and did the unthinkable, a proper three channel mixer with Ultraglide crossfaders at a price a broke teenager I could probably could justify. It quietly let a generation of people start who otherwise never would have. The Numark C2 did the same for the rack crowd, a four channel 19 inch rackmount that made your bedroom setup look like a real booth,and made your mates get moist!. The Numark DM1775 with a sampler built in felt like science fiction when you were still wrestling a Realistic. And the Vestax PMC-05, the battle mixer, the one the scratch kids had. If a mate turned up with a PMC-05 you suddenly found reasons to spend the night at his place. That crossfader made ours feel like a parking brake.

Then there was the Pioneer DJM-500, and here is where nostalgia has to tell the truth. We all wanted it. It was groundbreaking, the club standard, the first mixer that made effects feel like part of the performance rather than a bolt-on. It was also, in plain terms, a piece of shit. The thing distorted on basically every mix. You would line up two records, push the channel, and watch that green metering climb straight past everything useful and sit on solid red, and your beautiful blend would come out the other side sounding like it had been recorded through a tin. Green for half a second, then red, then resignation (or the sound tech running towars you yelling saying turn it down!!). It looked the part and it sold by the truckload, but anyone who used one hard knew its dirty little secret. Thank god they fixed it. The Pioneer DJM-600 that followed was a genuine game changer for the entire industry, the mixer that finally did everything the 500 promised and ran clean while it did it. That was the one that earned the legend the 500 got handed for free.

Above all of it, in a tier we could only point at, sat the rotaries. A UREI 1620 (pure sex of a mixer) or a Rane was not gear you owned at 19, it was gear you read about. Those were for proper club installs and people with real jobs. We knew the names the way you know the names of cars you will never drive. You dreamed, you priced one up once for a laugh, and then you went back to your shitbox.

Then came the saving, because decks were the real money and the real money was always over the horizon. So you bought belt drives, the plastic fantastic, the ones that drifted off pitch if you breathed near the platter. You learned to ride the pitch by hand because the deck would not hold a beat on its own. Speakers were whatever the op shop had that week, usually a mismatched pair of someone’s dead nan’s hi-fi, run far too hot and distorting in a way we decided was character. The whole setup cost less than 50 quid.

You have to understand it was a different life back then. Technology meant being excited that you had Windows 3.1, then later 95, and that was the cutting edge sitting in the corner of the lounge. None of it touched what we did. DJing was purely analogue. The vinyl, the mixer, the decks, your hands, and nothing in between. No screen, no waveform, no help. If the mix drifted you heard it, the room heard it, and you fixed it or you wore it. There was no sync and no safety net, and that taught you more than any forgiving setup ever could. You knew the dead spot on the fader. You knew which channel hummed. You knew the deck ran four percent faster on a cold night after a massive night laying out the latest Gatecrasher Wet album.

The gear was a barrier, plain and simple. DJing back then had a price point on the door, and you either paid it or you did not get in. There was no shortcut. You could’nt download a cracked copy of some program, drag in a folder of tracks you had never paid for, and bosh, a mix of the week’s biggest tunes by Friday night. If you wanted to play a record you bought the record. If you wanted to mix two of them you owned 2 decks and something to run them through, however shonky. That cost money most of us did not have, so we saved, we bought the cheap stuff, and we made it work, because the alternative was not DJing at all. It kept plenty of people out, and there is no romance in pretending otherwise, but it also meant everyone who got in had skin in the game. You had paid to be there, in cash and in hours, and you could hear the difference between someone who had and someone who had not.

Practise all week, shop on the weekend. The record shop was the whole social calendar. You went in, flicked the racks, listened on battered headphones at the counter, spent money you should have kept, and walked out with two or three 12″ you would wear out by Friday. And did anyone else religiously read the back pages of DJ Mag, iDJ, Mixmag, Jockey Slut and the Hard to Find catalogue, HTFR to those in the know, hunting for a deal on a deck package? Those classifieds were the wishbook for skint DJs, pages of belt drives and budget mixers bundled together at a price that felt almost doable if you skipped lunch for a month. Anyone remember when Ministry of Sound had their own decks and mixers? You would see them in those very pages and think, well, if the brand on the door of the club is good enough, maybe it is good enough for my bedroom too. (They weren’t)

And then someone let me stand in front of a pair of Technics SL-1200s. I put a hand on the platter and genuinely thought, what the FUCK is this?. It held its pitch. The torque was instant. The deck did what I told it the first time and every time after.

I am happy now. I run an NI Traktor S8 and it is everything I could wish for, give or take an old Bozak rotary I will probably never stop wanting. But that is life, things change. We were once thrilled that Numark had built the first three second sampler into a mixer, even though nobody on earth ever used it. Who the fuck does a three second sample? Doesn’t matter. We were excited anyway. That was the whole point.

by Damion Pell

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