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 Pioneer CDJ800 CD Turntable Review
(UKHH.com CD DJ’ing special)

 deejay feature 0015 added 15.09.04 words: Sumo Kaplunk technical: Spoon

Specs:Pioneer CDJ800

  • System: Compact Disc Digital Audio System
  • Disc Format: CD, CD-R and CD-RW
  • Music format: audio CD only.
  • CD drive: front-loading. Oil Damping Anti-Vibration Mechanism. Anti-shock Memory buffer (16 seconds in "CD" mode/10 seconds in "Vinyl" mode).
  • Frequency Response: 4 Hz - 20 kHz
  • Signal-to-Noise Ratio: 115 dB or more (JEITA)
  • Total Harmonic Distortion: 0.006% (JEITA)
  • Audio Output: 2.0 V
  • Jog-wheel/vinyl touch pad: 12",jog wheel with touch-sensitive top. Backlit LCD in centre Displays 136 frames per rotation in either direction.
  • Extended Master Tempo (+/-10% or +/-100%)
  • Legato Link Conversion: Allows reproduction of frequencies above 20 kHz.
  • Displays: jog-wheel centre, flashing/lighting buttons, LED (track number, timing, tempo, % tempo/pitch change and track progress bar)
  • Net Weight: 8.6 lbs
  • Dimensions (W x D x H): 12 x 13- 9/16 x 4- 5/16 in.
  • Recommended price: £475.00

Introduction
As a companion piece to DJ Coakley's in-depth examination of the latest version of Pioneer's landmark CDJ1000 Vinyl-emulating CD player, Sumo urges us not to forget about the CDJ1000's little brother, the CDJ800. Playing Dermot to Coakley's Davina, Sumo looks at this more affordable, yet surprisingly under-promoted version of Pioneer's benchmark-setting dj technology and the context in which it battles to become the industry standard…
Review:

" now they scratchin on CDs hahah aint that clever?" (Hidden track, Zimulated Xperiences LP, 1998, Phoenix Orion).

A few years ago, I was walking past a local highstreet electrical store when a strangely familiar noise drew my attention. It was scratching, far from good enough to be a song on the radio but not bad enough to be a sample on a keyboard or a software plugin, I was intrigued to identify the source of this curious sound. It turned out to be a tacky single-deck CD player with a handful of preset rhythms and a scratch pad which caught the ear but was not realistic at all. Sporting a sale price of £120, there were much more deserving uses of my Christmas money that year. Nevertheless, encountering this peculiar device in a high street retailer got me thinking… What if….?

Within the past five or so years, competition to create a CD player that not only does as well as a vinyl deck but which is also good enough to usurp the SL1200 as the industry-standard tool of the DJ trade has been getting evermore fierce. Many brands have tried to keep up with the times and there have been several attempts to enable scratching up of CDs via sliders, pads, sticks and jog wheels… Hopes were raised only then to be dashed… Finally, at the dawn of this century, Pioneer released the CDJ1000 which even now remains the benchmark by which other CD decks are judged. Given how many big name deejays and hiphop outfits are glad to make use of this new technology, (both in the studio and on stage), the CD deck's ultimate goal of making its vinyl ancestor redundant seems evermore within reach. There was, and remains a lot in the CDJ1000's favour but its astoundingly high price (up to £900) continues to make it prohibitively expensive. Slightly under two years ago, Pioneer finally released a much-needed "little brother of the cdj1000." The CDJ800 has a smaller footprint than its elder sibling and may lack some of the 1000's functions but it more than makes up for that by being more affordable (up to £300 cheaper per unit) and offering functions previously unavailable on any CD turntable. In fact, the specifications of the CDJ800 still fare extremely well in comparison with the recently released CDJ1000 MKII. This article's primary aim is to explore the strengths and limitations of the model and see how it fares alongside its revamped sibling and the competition posed by other CD players which have been developed since 2002. I shall also attempt to place the CDJ range in the wider context of what's going on with CD decks in general and their bid to replace the equipment that inspired them. I'll try to avoid veering into yet another vinyl Vs. CD/digital quarrel. Both sides of that argument have been stated too many times already and anyone who has given it any thought will have reached the same conclusion that it's swings'n'roundabouts; CDs offer reliably superior playback every time with greater ease of use and storage but then again, vinyl offers a richer mid-range sound and better access to realtime manipulation. Whilst this article is not pitting the formats against each other, the CDJ800 is attempting to offer an alternative to the standard vinyl deck so it will be necessary to compare both hardware and their respective recorded medium.

For many, how the machine feels and plays is as important as how it sounds. Arguably a few steps behind the competition, the CDJ range of decks continue to employ a static jog wheel. The rotation of the virtual record controlled by the jog wheel and its touch-sensitive top is indicated by the rotation of the marker in the backlit display at the centre of the turntable (charting 136 frames per rotation). There may not be actual rotation but the platter of the CDJ800 feels like a record - and there's no cat hairs nor any need to dunk one's hand in some Vaseline to get a grip on the music. The advantage the CDJ800 has over it's original big brother is the free and easy movement of the jog wheel which does feel like pushing/pulling a record on a slipmat. Such free platter rotation facilitates drags, spinbacks, pushes, lasers and zigzags. As far as the competition are concerned, Technics are leading the way. Platter freedom of the Technics SL DZ 1200 is customisable so that the wheel can be as stiff or free as the user desires. The closest the CDJ800 offers along these lines is a dial that makes no physical difference to the motion of the platter but which allows the user to adjust the start/stop speed of the virtual record. A vinyl release dial controls both speed of start (eg: like a record winding-up) and stop (ie: that deck-crash sound so beloved by Westwood). Unfortunately, there is only one adjustable setting for both start and stop on the CDJ800 whereas the CDJ1000 MKII now offers independent start/stop release customisation. Since the original launch of the Pioneer CDJ1000, Denon, Numark and Technics have all now released CD turntables which use motorised turntables and dummy records to replicate that authentic vinyl feel. This is open to mechanical error and, as Bullet Proof Monk, producer for Bristol's Fat Club, says, "You have to be ridiculously precise with the technics platter."

CD scratch pads and samples are nothing new -But something so accurate and realistic sounding as the CDJ1000/800's (excuse the pun) pioneering vinyl mode is as special as it gets in 2004. The CDJ800 reproduces and refines the touch-sensitive jog wheel platter introduced on the CDJ1000. Its scratch sound is perfect…perhaps too perfect. , if you rotate a vinyl record very-very slowly by hand, you might hear some weird abstract rumbles and other noises that are useful in mixes. On the other hand, Pioneer's algorithms are soooo tight and inflexible for the cdj800's vinyl modelling that all you get from tweaking (isn't that what Mixmaster Mike calls it when you manually revolve a record extremely slowly?) a tune is that tune very-very slowly. Perhaps future development of this technology should take into account material variations between records and so introduce a synthetic random element to the scratch system? That said, unless you are into mad ambient explorations of the texture of a record's physical groove, the scratches convince me and I have seen many websites and stores that run promotions where visitors are challenged to spot whether what they're hearing is a vinyl or CD scratch. To the best of my knowledge, none of these shops/websites have gone broke as a result of running such taste-challenge promotions. One new scratch-related function that marks an improvement on the CDJ800's more expensive big brother is quick return. Switching on the "Quick return" mode allows the user to instantly return to the last cue so they can keep scratching up the same sound without having to backspin exactly to the "a" of "Ah yeah" every time. On the one hand this saves a lot of time and effort and has its vinyl equivalent in the needle drop. However, on the other, purists would argue that cutting is the one skill every deejay should know. As useful as it may be, Quick Return does prevent the performance of certain scratches; severely limiting the repertoire of the lazy deejay. With quick-return active, hydroplaning (tapping/rubbing the record as it revolves to give that squishy under-water sound) is not possible because touching the record when in Quick return mode automatically returns play to the cue point. Future versions of the CDJ800/1000 need to have their single pressure-sensitive top of the wheel divided into segments or inner and outer rings so that taps and rubs can be performed at the same time as pull/spin forward/backs (i.e.: faderless scratch techniques like Swipes). It would also be helpful if the quick-return button was not at the top of the machine but rather closer to where the deejay's hand is manipulating the platter in order to toggle this function with greater ease.

A major reason for the significant difference in price between either version of the CDJ1000 and 800 is the absence of interchangeable memory cards and sophisticated programmable cues from the 800. The CDJ800 has an internal memory that allows for 500 cues to be stored. "500" sounds impressive at first but it turns out that only one cue can be stored per CD. This wastes the one strength of CD and CDR technology. Whereas a vinyl deejay has to lug around crates of 12"s and 7"s, it is possible for a CD deejay to compile and burn their own selections onto the one CDR. There is nothing visually interesting about a CD deejay having to repeatedly eject and insert lots of CDRs whereas it does look good when vinyl deejays are flipping records on and off their platters. One clear advantage of CD players over vinyl decks where scratching is concerned is the freedom to create your own battle tools. No longer is the deejay held to ransom by whatever has been pressed up for them. A CD deejay can download wavs and mp3s off the net - or even record direct from their favourite DVDs and radio shows - edit the sounds, compile them and burn them onto custom cDRs. There are now even CD DJ tools commercially available containing the scratch staples: Fab 5 Freddy's "AAAAh Fresh," Run-DMC's "Ah yeah," the "Ooooh" from George Clinton's Atomic Dog and Rakim's "Pump up the volume."A good example of this is The Ultimate Scratch DJ CD However, even with the Quick search function (available when the deck is in "CD Mode"), speedy access to a specific sound is impossible without resorting to shuffling through the track on which it appears. The CDJ1000 offers a number of programmable Hot cues and with "proper" vinyl records, it is possible to use stickers and pen on the centre label to mark up all the cues you want to access to perform juggles and scratch sentences. The limited cue storage/access capacity of the CDJ800 wouldn't matter so much if the CDJ series had one function that appears on other pioneer models (including the cdx3000), namely a WAV view. Without tending to their different cue storage capacities, the use of dummy records and revolving platters by the competition help to overcome cueing problems. It is possible to slip a piece of paper with cues marked on it.

The CDJ800's display is bold and simple: LEDs indicating time elapsed/remaining, track number, track tempo, degree of increase/decrease and a block LED indicating track progress. Those are all fab. However, as stylish as they may first seem, LEDs get very warm after a while and do not tend to have very long lives. Unlike any turntables I have ever seen, the CDJ800 (much like most CD decks) comes with a built-in bpm counter. If there is a clear beat then the built in bpm count is very accurate - occasionally it picks up on the half beat and so a track of 85bpm is read as 170bpm. The cultural/genre bias that informs the design and development of CD turntables (a bias toward catering for the metronomic monotony of Dance music) means that the machines born from such a bias are only designed to deal with a tempo range of 70-140BPM. In actuality, the CDJ800 will often have problems with tracks outside the even narrower range of 90-130BPM. The CDJ800 also gets confused by tracks without a regular beat and by tracks which have a beat but which also have other prominent, extraneous noises that do not reinforce the beat. Obviously any BPM counting system is going to have problems with tracks that do not have a regular tempo throughout - but mixers should have independent manual beat counters. The bpm counter sometimes takes a while to kick in which can get annoying - especially when dealing with a TV theme or ad jingle which can be as short as 15 seconds long. A sneaky way to circumvent this limitation is to edit tracks before they are burnt to CDR so that bars where the beat is clearest are copy & pasted several times over to the front of the track. Yes, this is cheating but then again, CD deejays will not have the luxury of 12" remixes and their extended intros; you will be dealing with tracks from CD albums where there is often added dialogue obscuring the rhythm of intros and outros.

Like any vinyl deck, the CDJ800 allows the user to alter the speed and pitch of a record. Unlike any vinyl deck however, the CDJ800 enables enormous adjustments in speed; within ranges of either +/-10% or +/-100%. The former allows for more accurate beat matching and mixing and the latter allows for the creation of interesting sounds. I personally would have preferred the tempo/pitch slider to have been accompanied by a pair of +/- buttons or one programmable button that provided instant access to an alternative tempo but I guess that wouldn't be an authentic recreation of the vinyl experience. Accuracy of tempo change for both the CDJ800 and the CDJ1000 MKII is 0.05%. In addition to offering a pitch/tempo range with which vinyl cannot compete, Pioneer's patented Master Tempo technology allows the CDJ user to change the speed without altering the pitch of the recording. If the tempo change is minor, this works extremely well. However, it is a very limited technology. The problem here is not with the machine itself but with the recording medium it uses. CD/CDRs store music as linear samples at a fixed frequency. There's only so many samples per-second and so, when slowed down too much, the outcome is a horrifically granulised Fatboy Slim nightmare. Conversely, if the track is sped up too much, the outcome is a jolting/clicking sound, much like pressing forward-shuffle on a regular CD player. Other models and makes offer compatibility with mp3, wma - and if you've got the money, no doubt somebody's got a DVD compatible deck for you. Whatever the case, the finite sound resolution of linear-sampling digital media remains a frustrating problem. As it is, "master tempo" is only really functional within a range of +/-15 BPM. Any wider tempo adjustments must be accompanied by corresponding pitch changes if vocals/acoustic instruments are to sound natural. Given this limitation, the CDJ800 does not lose anything by having half as many pitch/tempo ranges as the CDJ1000MKII. If unless the Fatboy Slim sound is intentional, it is also advisable that master tempo and vinyl release are not used in conjunction because even with modest tempo adjustments, deck wind-up/downs get trippy.

Having successfully emulated the sound and feel of a vinyl deck, the quest continues on toward innovation far beyond the CD deck's inspiration. The innovations applied to the CDJ800 and other CD decks see the evolution of CD decks drawing ever closer to combining deck, mixer and sampler into the one box. Whereas vinyl deejays need two copies of the same break on two separate decks to create a continual loop, the CDJ800 offers great looping functions on the one unit. Using the cue in/out and loop-on/off, it's easy to set up a continuous loop. It is also possible to instantly switch to a 1/8, ¼ and ½ of a manually selected loop with the touch of that respective button. Conversely, if the BPM is correct, pressing those same 1/8-1/1 buttons exactly on the beat will automatically create perfect loops. In the absence of some much-needed manual BPM-count tap correction, the ability to hook up a short loop makes it far easier for the machine to figure out a plausible BPM. That said, if you're thinking of looping up the first two bars of a track, think on - and read on. For some reason known only to Pioneer, the CDJ800 only allows auto cueing/looping after two-and-a-half seconds into a given track. This design quirk makes no sense. The unit's unsurpassed scratch capabilities would suggest that the CDJ800 was made with hiphop in mind and yet, given how so many classic (and not so classic but still well known) rap tracks are based on the looping up of the first two or so opening bars of songs, the CDJ800's apparent refusal to permit this simple procedure suggests contrary. Seemingly oblivious to the most famous breakbeats and the culture surrounding them, Pioneer either don't want their hiphop customers to do the same ol same and loop up that Syl Johnson Different strokes break for the umpteenth OR, (and maybe more likely), this product was not designed with hiphop in mind. Either way, there is a way around this design fault. By letting the song play out and then pressing on the jog wheel and back-spinning back to the beginning, it is possible to then set a cue/loop-start at a track's beginning because the cue buttons are now active.

For the CDJ1000 and its similarly priced equivalents, interchangeable memory cards make cue storage and exchange fast and easy. Furthermore, some machines that boast mp3 compatibility also allow storage and exchange of song information. Unfortunately, it is in this area that Pioneer have made their savings on the CDJ800 which lacks any convenient form of memory transfer. It does however use digital outputs which do allow transfer of information to both other CDJ800 units and any digital studio equipment to which they are connected. The cumbersome 1 cue per CD memory and absence of practical information transfer of the CDJ800 suggest that it's aimed more for radio and casual party settings than for complex and fast-paced battles or studio compositions. As advances in technology see DJ CD players taking on more and more characteristics of samplers, cue storage isn't the only use of memory by these machines. The Technics SL DZ 1200s and the Denon DNS3000 go that step further with their own internal memory, not just for cues, but for banks of loops themselves. This allows the user to scratch over a break all on the one same machine. That's great for the user but potentially disastrous for the manufacturer who have robbed themselves a client base because they have removed any incentive for users to upgrade nor buy peripheral extras. If the user has all their eggs in the one basket and relies on the one unit for playing CDs, looping phrases and adding effects, a fault in one of these systems could render the whole unit useless.

It is annoying that there is no logical graduation of functions and facilities both within the CDJ range and across any other range from any other brand. The CDJ800 lacked certain functions present on the original CDJ1000 and yet even now, it retains functions absent from the CDJ1000MKII. Cost may favour the CDJ800 over both incarnations of the 1000 but then again, the price of the relatively cheap CDJ800 (both new and 2nd hand) continues to be far greater than any comparable vinyl-based set-up. One new cdj800 unit can cost anything up to £550 so a complete deejay set-up will cost around £1500. In marked contrast, two vinyl deejays can be well kitted out for the same price with enough change left over for a couple battle tools. The biggest problem however with the CDJ800 (and any CD, MP3 or non-vinyl turntable product for that matter) has nothing to do with hardware. The problem is availability of software. Whilst most hiphop is released on CD and sometimes exclusively so, the test of a good deejay is being able to dig out and then cut and mix the most obscure but most funky breaks and samples - which come from leafing through dusty 7"s in second-hand shops and record fairs. Sure all the most well-known breaks can be found on umpteen CD compilations but that's no help. If you want to be a CD beat-digger you've got to buy the vinyl, play the vinyl, record the vinyl onto computer and then burn it onto CD which is a costly and time-consuming process. So, if Pioneer (or one of their competitors) could create a product with all the cdj800's current functions plus wave view, plus memory cards, plus a built in phrase sampler then it'd be perfect And if Pioneer employed Secondson or Pogo or somebody like that to compile mid-price DJ breaks library CDs then the CD deejay would be on a level playing field with their vinyl counterparts. If all that was done, then I would encourage DJ Premier and Pete Rock to dump those fusty SL1200s. Until then, vinyl still rules OK.

Alas! The rise of the CD DJ marks the gradual tearing of the link between deejaying and production. As hiphop production and hiphop deejaying move in ever different directions, hiphop is witnessing the gradual extinction of two species: 1) the hiphop deejay possessing a strong grounding in the music's funk and jazz heritage, 2) the club deejay composing hiphop instrumentals on the fly in the live context.

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- Sumo Kaplunk

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