 Technics
SL-DZ1200 Direct Drive CD Turntable
Review
(UKHH.com CD DJ’ing special)
deejay feature
0014 added
11.09.04 words Coakley
technical:
QED
Specs:
- Vinyl emulation with moving platter action
- CD-MP3 support (32kps-192kps)
- SD audio support
- SD card reader
- MPEG2-ACC/MP3 support
- Effects
- Sample pads
- Cueing pads
Origins:
When Technics released the SL1200 turntable in the late 1970’s, little
did they know that they had created a design masterpiece; one that would
last over 30 years as the trusted industry standard.
Over 3 million Technics turntables have been sold worldwide to date, and
as pointed out in the seminal turntablist flick ‘Scratch’, at one point
sales of Technics were outperforming the sales of guitars by Gibson and
Fender put together!
And you can’t revise perfection. Indeed despite 5 revisions the
legendary decks have undergone only minor changes over that time.
Then Technics did something nobody was expecting. After many years of
allowing the competition to get away from them, with innovative CD deck
products (particularly the now industry standard Pioneers), Technics
debuted their first CD deck at last years Plasa show at Earls Court,
London.
A complete digital revolution from a company, that was for so many
years, reliant on evolution over revolution.
Looks/Design:
It’s fairly obvious that the design brief for this deck was ‘make a CD
deck that adheres to the design principles of the original beloved vinyl
deck, which emulates the function of the original platter and has the
same striking, classic look and feel’.
DJ’s are a reluctant lot. They want the accessibility and feel of vinyl,
if they are to move over to CD. In order to be profitable the Technics
CD deck would have to be exactly like a CD SL1200. It would have to have
the same intuitiveness about it.
Looks wise the SL-DZ is stylish and well laid out. It is by far the
better looking of the two decks, when compared to its main competitor
the 80’s black plasticky Pioneer CDJ 1000’s. A classy silver finish with
a platinum, rotating, silver platter/’vinyl’ on top. It’s laid out in a
similar vein to the original SL1200 with the ‘start’ button (or ‘cue’ &
‘Play’ buttons in this case) on the bottom left side of the deck along
with the ‘On/Off’ (or ‘platter freewheel’ in this case) platter
switch….and yes you can do long wind-downs, by powering off, just like
you can do on a vinyl deck. The pitch control as always on situated on
the right hand side with a ‘quartz lock’ emulated reset button to return
the pitch to ‘0’ (as seen on the SL1210 MK5’s).
Underneath that is a switch that allows you to click for CD play or SD
card play.
At the top left there is a bank of 4 cue pads and 4 sample pads for
triggering loops and different cueing points on your CD (more on that
later), and on the top right hand side is a save button effects and
platter reverse/forward motion switch.
Size-wise the SL-DZ is just a little over half the size of an SL1200
deck.
The Display unit:
The display unit of any CD deck can make or break it. The Pioneer CDJ’s
are industry standard particularly because the information displayed and
the clarity of it, is pretty much perfect.
Here the display, which sits in the middle of the platter of the SL-DZ,
displays all manner of important information such as track number,
countdown (time remaining), BPM counter and pitch number give you all
the information you need (plus irrelevant shit you don’t require – such
as the gimmick animation it plays when you fire the fucker up).
On top of this, taking a feature from the Pioneers, the SL-DZ display
shows a ‘progress ladder’ whish lets you know exactly where you are in
the track. The best way to explain this is that it acts in the same way
a gym treadmill program will work with the peaks and troughs of the
track displayed (in a similar way to how a treadmill program will
display the peaks and troughs of elevation on a road). It is now
possible to see ahead on a track and anticipate big breakdowns and
dramatic peaks.
Not that that’s much use for modern day Hip-Hop which hasn’t really
featured huge break beats and scratch solo routines since the early
90’s….it’s more valuable to a house DJ. It will be interesting to see
how turntablists in particular use this machine and this facility
though. It will certainly make it much easier to anticipate the parts
the DJ’s want to juggle, cue up and the breakdowns they want to scratch
over a lot quicker. The digital equivalent of the sticky taped marked-up
vinyl.
Formats:
The SL-DZ1200 is compatible with CD, MP3 and SD audio, so that pretty
much the whole range of digital formats is at your fingertips. If you’re
a Mac user using one of those higher capacity MP4, or whatever it is,
formats… I have no idea if your tunes will need to be converted or not,
so it is worth trying before you potentially buy.
Pitch Control:
The pitch control is fair enough. It is obviously (given it’s a Technics,
and a digital one at that!) accurate as fuck, but it does feel a bit
cheap and doesn’t feel solid at all and glides a bit to easily for my
liking. I much prefer the slightly more solid, tougher, original pitch
control on the SL1200’s. Still it’s not as plastiky as the Pioneer CDJ
and it does its job adequately. It’s a question of ‘feel’ over function
really for me personally.
The pitch can be ranged to reflect the original SL1200’s -+8 tempo, or
can be ranged to go up to as much as -+50, meaning that, technically
speaking anyway, you could mix a hip-Hop record in with a speed garage
joint….if you so wished. Though personally why anyone would want to mix
a record in above +4.5 on a turntable is beyond me, it just sounds shite!
As said before you can press a reset button, which emulates the ‘quartz
lock reset’ introduced on the SL1200 MK5’s, to knock the pitch down to 0
at any given moment.
Effects & Cueing:
 At the top right of the deck is an ‘effects type’ button where you can
cycle through a few pre-determined effects (distortion, wah-wah, etc),
some of which are quite nice and can work quite well when you feel like
fucking around with the intro to something like ‘TROY’ giving it an
extra little twist. There is also a ‘reverse’ function, which as you can
imagine plays the track in reverse. One for the DnB / garage wind-back
DJ’s me-thinks.
The ‘cue point save’ and ‘Auto reload’ features enable you to pull off
accurate start ups and act like a ‘virtual’ stylus drop. The eight
rubber ‘cue’/’sample’ pads I talked of earlier are for assigning 4 cue
points on your CD or 4 samples. You can only play 2 samples at any given
time and you can’t scratch the samples or put them through effects….you
can just play them.
This is a bit of a let down and Technics should sort this out for the
inevitable MK2’s.
The sample function is interesting in that it is now possible to do
stabs / transfromers without the use of a cross fader, by which I mean
you can have a CD deck with a ‘battle record’ CD in it and cue up
‘freeeeesshhhhh’ or ‘ahhhhhhh’ or whatever and just hit a button to
stab/transform it in.
i.e. “Ahh ahh ahh a a a a a a a a a a a a a a ahhhhhhhhhhhh ahh ahh ahh
aaaaaaaa ahh!”
Looping:
This is taken care of by buttons situated around the inner display disc
of the platter. You simply hit ‘in’ when you want to start the loop and
‘out’ when you want to exit and the deck will then loop the bit in
between endlessly. This is nothing new in terms of CD technology, when I
was a teenager I had a CD Hi-Hi with an A/B button that did the same
thing, only on the Technics it’s been refined to be more accurate.
That being said, unlike other decks like the Pioneer CDJ’s, if you don’t
punch the ‘in’ button at exactly the right moment, you cannot edit it
down using a ‘jog wheel’ (or in this case the ‘platter’), so you have to
get it exactly right, first time.
The Platter:
This single function will be the making or breaking of this deck.
According to my contact at Panasonic they took 3 years to develop the
platter alone. As they should! If it is anything less, than a ‘digital
SL1200’, when it starts up, people will fart on it.
Thankfully when you hit play the platter starts to revolve, exactly like
an original Technics SL1200. They got the torque almost (so very
almost!) spot on, and it is a true joy to behold when you manipulate the
vinyl and get hands on and the movement back and forth on the platter
translates exactly to what happens with the sound.
The only gripe I have with the platter is that the silver revolving disc
is too small and should be a full 12” size to properly emulate a real
piece of wax. That being said everything else about the disc is
beautiful! There’s a handy black line running up to the 12 o clock
position to act as a marker and there’s a lovely vinyl groove running
along the disc making it feel like you are touching a real wax, albeit
pretty shiny, platinum piece of wax.
The torque on the SL-DZ works, it’s that simple. You can cut and scratch
away to your hearts content, safe in the knowledge that there will be no
skipping whatsoever. Is it as spot on as a ‘real’ Technics? No…. but
coupled with my trusty Vestax battle mixer, I was capable of making the
same crabs, flares and other scratches just as easily as with my
original SL1210’s only now I can do them with added effects and with
handy cue in points. If I could have been arsed I’m sure I could have
sorted out some cue points to trigger them in as well.
See my comparative piece on the merits of the SL-DZ against the CDJ
1000’s for more on this, but put it this way the platter on the SL-DZ
makes the Pioneer ‘jog wheel’ look and feel completely shite in
comparison.
Other shit:
At the back of the deck is an adjustable brake dial, which you can turn
to alter how fast the deck platter brakes when you press pause. You can
crank this up so that it brakes in around half a second (to make the
deck emulate the original quartz SL1200’s swift braking torque), or you
can lower the brake adjust to emulate the now industry standard Pioneer
CDJ’s.
This is a nice little feature that allows you to adjust the platter
brake; where you would previously have to violate your warranty with a
DIY tweak on your old SL1200’s.
The SD card function allows you to store music on a memory stick that
come in 128mb and 512mb varieties. To be honest I couldn’t really get to
grips with the SD card I was supplied with and I can’t say it’s any more
handy than just having your shit copied onto a CD disc, but apparently
they are the future so perhaps I should have looked into this a lot
further. A quick net investigation tells me that already customers are
complaining that the pitch control won’t go about +16 when using SD
cards with MP3 format on them and that it takes longer to cue them up
and they’re not as instant as CD’s.
Overall:
 The Technics is a high spec CD player that’s got a good set of features,
taking some of the more beneficial features from their competitors, such
as the rotating platter, on board sampler, and the use of SD cards, and
it is capable of doing some interesting things with them, such as the
ability to save the scratches you perform. This should make for easier
mix tape engineering and programming and will make future world DMC’s
the most controversial they have ever been! (See my comparative CD V’s
Vinyl article for more on this and the potential future controversies,
when it comes to competition).
At the end of the day Technics set out to create what the consumer
wanted, a digital SL1200….and guess what, they’ve very nearly succeeded.
In terms of the hands-on-ness that heads are after, the platter handles
this well. It isn’t perfect and exactly the same as a SL1200, but it is
the closest thing to it. The torque on the platter is very close to that
of an SL1200 and that’s the main thing. I think the looks and design of
the deck are as clean and functional as the SL1200, but there are areas
(such as the pitch control) were it’s not as good a ‘feel’ and there’s a
cheap feel to some of the buttons/switches.
In terms of how it competes with it’s nearest competitor, the Pioneer
CDJ 1000’s check out my more in depth, comparative article, elsewhere on
UKHH.com. Like the Technics Vs Vestax debate it will roll on and on in
digital DJ’ing circles and there’s merits for and against for each CD
deck. In terms of the platter though (surely the most important feature
in terms of ‘feel’ for a Hip-Hop DJ), it shits on the Pioneer.
Also check out Sumo’s review of the Pioneer CDJ 800 here.
Rating: 8/10
Dope shit:
- Close as it is possible to get ‘vinyl’
emulation/platter.
- Great clean stylish design/looks.
- It will NEVER skip!
- Cue in points & looping facility enables on the
spot remixing.
- The ‘treadmill’ type ‘troughs & peaks’ display
effect.
Shit shit:
- You can’t edit loops.
- Not as many features as other decks.
- Not industry standard (yet).
- A much better optimised & revised MK2 is
inevitably on its way.
- £700 for ONE deck is some expensive shit man!
(you could buy TWO Vestax decks for that price)
- Certain turntablism effects/tricks/scratches
still aren’t possible on CD decks, despite this one having a moving
platter.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE YOUR COMPANIES EQUIPMENT, MIXTAPES
OR CLUB NIGHTS REVIEWED IN UKHH.com, THE LEADING UK HIP-HOP SITE, CONTACT:
info@ukhh.com.
- thecoakley@hotmail.com
 Related
Links:
www.djcoakley.com
(Me!)
www.hiphopsoc.com
(University of University Hip-Hop Society and online home of 'Sunday Service')
 www.britishhiphop.co.uk
(Database of local & UK Wide artists)
www.skratchuk.com
Online DJ store
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