Hier ein User Review/Diskussionsthread aus dem VDJ Forum:
Well, having took delivery of my new Hercules RMX unit on Friday, and played with it all weekend, I have to say all in all it's not really much better than my BCD3000. Looks nice and shiny, but fundamentally nothing new. There are a number of comments I would have both about the unit itself and about it's support for VDJ. So here goes:
The RMX unit itself, having been much hyped as "Pro Gear at a reasonable price" I personally don't think is so pro here's why:
1. The main volume control is purely a midi controller for a connected program, i.e. VDJ. There is no "master output" control on the unit that actually attenuates the main outputs. Whilst one could argue that if you are using an external mixer this is not an issue I would argue that if PC based DJ'ing is going to really move forward, any control devices such as these should do the whole job, and not rely on you having additional equipment.
2. None of the FX buttons or the kill switches have Led's on them. Despite looking very much the same as all the other buttons they do not iiluminate. This just smack's of cheapness and cost cutting.
3. On my unit anyway, the gain, bass mid and treble potentiometers supposed centre position is different on every switch, and not in the center!. I thought at first this could be physically the positioning of the knob onto the stem of the pot. However all of them have exactly same max and min positions. This again smacks of the use of cheap resistors that are obviously sending slightly different output values to VDJ for the same positions. I'm being picky I know, but for £260, I'm gonna be!
4. The push buttons themselves have way to much travel in them and no definite click to them. For most buttons this is not an issue, however for the skip forward and back buttons (which I think are mapped to a 16 beat skip in VDJ) because of this issue when you need a very precise and quick "push" you don't always get it.
5. No power button! I know its USB bus powered, but pulling connectors in and out to reset a device is just poor.
6. Hercules quoted "Adjustable resistance: makes the jog wheels more or less resistant, according to the DJ’s preference". I can certainly adjust the sensitivity of the job wheel, but this quote gave me the impression the physicaly resistivity of the wheel could be adjusted. Not that I can feel it can't.
7. Apparently the cross fader curve can be adjusted in the Hercules control panel. I can't find this. We can do this in VDJ anyway.
8. There are no buttons to control FX parameters or sample playback volume.
9. If like me, you want to use the full functionality of DJ control units without having to use external mixers etc, you would expect to be able to stack any outputs (i.e. soundcard + RMX, or BCD + RMX) using stackble RCA/Phono leads to a single pair of outputs for connection to amp/pa/hifi. Wrong, the output bus signals of the RMX completely obliterate the mid and treble ranges of any other connected device. You don't even have to doing anything on the RMX, the mere act of connecting the thing completely cuts the higher ranges from any other device. Again this would not be a problem if you are using physically seperate connections to say and external mixer, but I don't want that!
Ok so that's my gripes with the unit itself, so here's the problems with VDJ and it's support for the unit:
1. If a song has been playing for greater than about 30 secs, and you minimize VDJ to do something else, the playback pauses for roughly 10msec. Not good.
2. Every now and again, theres a little sudden pop. Nothing is being touched its playing back all on its ownsome. Settings in performance are set to fastest with Latency set to auto and overclock selected.
3. The FX buttons only allow configuration with a set of preselected effects in the setup. To use any FX other than these your back to the screen and mouse. A better configuration would have been to be able to configure a button to invoke the effect select or sample select and then use the up/down buttons to go to the desired effect and the right button to load it. Then use another button to activate the loaded effect or sample. As stated above though, you have no control over parameters!
4. Talking of the up/down/left/right buttons which supposedly allow you to browse, they dont. When you are on the directory side of the track panel, if like me you have your library in a variety of directories and subdirectories, you cannot open them using these buttons. Also there is no repeat on the buttons, so if you have a long song list (4000+ like me) in your window, you have to press down once for every song to scroll down!
5. One of the more fundamental issues for me, is I want to be able to use a multi instance skin, and the RMX/BCD to control 1 instance each. 4 Decks YES!!!.
Well NO actually. I Start up VDJ configured completely to use the BCD. In remote control the BCD unit is active. I'm also using Moramax's BCD mapper. All output is to the BCD asio driver. At this point I have the RMX usb disconnected. Everything works fine and dandy. Plug in the RMX unit, and hey presto the the RMX unit now controls the current VDJ session even though it's configured for the BCD! Not so handy when when you have two instances going and you specifically only want the RMX to control one of them. And before anyone says this is a device conflict thats unavoidable, the BCD will happily control just it's own instance, and not the RMX's instance. So it must be to do with how the RMX has been implemented to connect with VDJ.
6. Again using multi instance, the network setup to allow syncing between the two instances seems to be VERY slow, lots of latency gets introduced and the sync only seems to work well if you sync before the decks starts to play. If you hit sync when both instances are playing it does all sorts of strange jumping about.
So rant over. As I said my overall impression of the RMX is exactly as I stated in the title, not so hot. Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad unit, certainly looks pretty and the jogs are a much much higher quality than the BCD unit. I've not used any of the other hercules units so I don't know how they compare to these but they seem good to me. Also the fact that the mic input works on this is fantastic. I know this is not strictly an issue with the BCD units themselves and it's more of an implementation issue with VDJ, but it's good to having a working mic again without having to have a seperate channel on a mixer.
So a message to all you BCD3000 owners out there who have been looking forward to the RMX's release as an upgrade route, you will have the advantage of A) A working Mic input, B) Better jogs. This may be an issue for you, but is it a £260 issue?, because these two things really are the only advantage you will get.
Oh, and a better looking console ;-)
Hammer
(Quelle:
http://www.virtualdj.com/forums/87918/Hardware_Technical_Support/Hercules_RMX_-_Not_so_Hot_.html )
