Hercules DJ Console RMX Review

Overview:

This is the Hercules DJ Console RMX. Its a MIDI control surface for DJ’s with a built in 4×4 USB audio interface, and so far, it rocks.

Background:

I’ve been a bedroom producer / DJ for going on 5 years. My tool of choice is Ableton Live, but for a while now I’ve realized that my DJ skills were being severely limited by the lack of a proper DJing sound-card. I’ve been using the M-Audio Firewire Solo, which has been a great piece of equipment for me, but lacks the two separate stereo outputs required for cueing DJ mixes. I’ve played a couple of parties with my setup, but inevitably screw up a few times as I was basically “playing blind” (or rather, deaf) by not being able to listen to my tracks before I played them for the crowd. That needed to change.

I started looking for 4×4 USB soundcards, and soon realized that their were a couple of sound-cards with built-in MIDI controllers specific to DJing. I’ve been using an M-Audio Axiom 49 to control things so far, which is another great piece of equipment, but its not exactly tailored to be the ideal DJ setup. Initially I was looking at the Hercules MKII, but was turned off by its cheap build quality and cramped space. I also came really close to purchasing the Behringer BCD-3000; luckily before I bought it at Guitar Center the guy let me take it out of the box to get a feel for it. In doing so I found that all of the controls felt pretty chintzy, and one of the jog wheels was even sticky in a spot and wouldn’t turn smoothly! I’m so glad I turned this down, as compared to the RMX, the Behringer is a POS.

After many more hours of online research, I found that Hercules had a new product coming out, the DJ Console RMX, which promised “pro” quality and build. It just came out last month, so there was a dearth of reviews (besides this Dutch review that I can barely understand even with Google translator). Normally I’m a very cautious consumer, and read every review possible before shelling cash. This time though there were none available, but despite this I decided to take the plunge anyway. Someone has to be the first reviewer, right?

Unpacking:

I ordered this online at GuitarCenter.com (it was sold out at my usual retailer of choice, Zzounds.com), and received it in the mail about a week later. Looking at the box, I was unimpressed. Its got some really uninspired graphic design that makes it look just like a mid-90’s 3D graphics card box, which I guess makes sense because if I recall Hercules was a major graphics card vendor in the 90’s. Once I got it out of the box though, I completely forgot about that crappy graphic design and got lost in the beauty of shiny all those shiny knobs and buttons. Right inside the box is the carrying case, which has the DJ Console tucked away inside of it, encased in Styrofoam. The case is a nice touch, but I wish it had some pockets for extra cables and such. I found that although the Console lacks a proper cover to protect the knobs during transport, I could reuse the Styrofoam packing to achieve this purpose. It would’ve been nice to have the dedicated cover though… but oh well.

The first thing you’ll notice when you take this thing out is it’s really heavy. The think looks and feels like it was carved out of a single piece of steel. This may be a disadvantage to some weak-armed people out there, but I think its great as it makes you feel like its indestructible and a real pro piece of equipment. I guess Hercules really took to heart the complaints about their MKII being cheap and plastiky feeling, as they’ve completely remedied this issue. Compared to the MKII and Behringer, this thing is rock solid. Its slightly larger than my laptop, and fits nicely on the table sitting in front of it. The weight and hard rubber feet give it a really rooted feel so it doesn’t feel like it will slide around during heavy use.

Along with the case and console, it comes packaged with a fairly long USB cable (maybe too long considering you’ll probably have your laptop very close to the console in order to read the screen), an installation CD, and an instruction manual. I really like printed instruction manuals instead of PDF, as I spend all day at work reading boring stuff on a computer screen and I don’t really want to have to do it at home. The manual seemed impressively hefty to me at first, until I realized that it contained the same info printed in six different languages. I guess this means they’re really serious about targeting the international DJ scene. I only wish that it had come with a manual for the Virtual DJ software; it has a brief tutorial but doesn’t go into any real depth.

Installation:

It was REALLY easy. I stuck in the CD which auto-loaded, and within 2 minutes had installed the drivers and Virtual DJ software. Apparently the CD drivers are the latest version, so I didn’t even need to download anything extra from the Hercules website. As soon as I’d installed it, I ran the Virtual DJ software and was immediately able to start playing with my music with no further configuration. Excellent!

I/O:

The unit has 4 audio input channels and 4 audio output channels on the back of the unit. For each channel there is a choice of RCA or 1/4 jack. I didn’t realize this until I read the manual, but you can use the 1/4 and RCA jacks simultaneously if you’d like to duplicate the output for extra monitoring or recording options. This is actually a pretty sweet feature that I didn’t even consider at first. The inputs are also switchable between line and phono input, so you don’t need a separate phono pre-amp to run your turntables. They also include grounding connectors. These inputs have “source” buttons above them to allow you to override the PC output with live output from one of the inputs, useful if you want to mix vinyl with MP3. The inputs also allow you to use time-coded control CD’s or Vinyl, an option I haven’t explored yet but may try in the future.

On the top of the unit there is a 1/4 headphone jack and 1/4 microphone jack, each with their own dedicated volume controls. These jacks are duplicated on the front, though apparently you can’t use the front and top jacks at the same time, so no dual-headphones or mics sadly. The headphone jack always outputs channels 3 and 4 for pre-listening to tracks. The microphone jack allows you to talk over the music. It sends the input directly to the outputs, and automatically drops the volume of any music playing by an amount specified in the control panel. This allows you to talk over the music to make announcements much like a radio DJ. This is a nice feature, but I’ll probably use the inputs on the back for my microphone, as they can then be routed to internal effects before being sent to the outputs. The one thing this console is really lacking is an XLR jack with phantom power for running condenser mics. I can understand them not including this as most DJ’s won’t need this feature, but it kind of limits me as I do a lot of music production as well, and condenser mics are really essential for clear vocals. I guess for that I’ll have to go back to my M-Audio.

The sound of the outputs is pretty good, to my ears. There was a tiny amount of clicking and skipping in the playback, but this can probably be fixed by tweaking some of my PC settings. I’ll probably need to increase the ASIO buffer size and turn off my wireless card. The glitches were barely noticeable though, and overall the sound was nice, although I don’t profess to be an audiophile. The output of this thing is pretty loud too – I had the main volume set to about 1/4 for a comfortably loud listening level – a level that my M-Audio would have generated at about 1/2 volume.

One thing I saw some people complaining about in the forums is that it doesn’t have a dedicated power adapter. It draws all its power from USB, which makes sense as a PC is required to use it, but apparently some people had trouble with it drawing too much power from USB and are getting an error message. I didn’t have this problem, so for me this lack of power adapter is fine. It would be awesome if you could use this console as a stand-alone audio mixer, but I can understand how they would need to leave this feature out at this price point.

For those interested, here are my system specs:

Gateway C-140X Laptop

Intel 2.2GHZ Core 2 Duo Processor

2.5 GB RAM

160GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive

Windows XP SP2

Usage:

I’m used to DJing with Ableton Live. I’ve been using the program for years, and have become really familiar with its work-flow. However, for the sake of science I decided to try out the Virtual DJ software first, as its pre-customized to work specifically with the RMX’s controls.

I must admit, the Virtual DJ interface is pretty ugly. Its got a Windows 95 kinda look going for it, but I do like the un-cluttered feel of the interface at least. It’s a crippled “LE” version, but thankfully the full version lets you change skins. At the top is a strip which displays the waveforms- one deck is red and the other blue. They overlap so you can match them up, and also have little dots underneath to indicate the transients. Beneath the waveform view is two turntables, which show the action of the jog wheel and all the EQ and effect controls. The bottom half of the screen is dominated by the track browser, with directories on the left and songs on the right. The built in navigational buttons let you go through the directories very quickly, especially when combined with the jog wheels for scrolling through long lists. It did take me a little bit to find out that the you expand directories by using the “load deck” buttons. Once within a directory full of music, you can use these buttons to load the song onto either of two decks. Overall this method of song navigation is very intuitive, but I haven’t yet figure out how to set up playlists or rate my tracks. If you don’t want to use the included browser, you can actually drag songs from iTunes or a windows folder directly to the tables, a nice feature.

The Virtual DJ software is very easy and intuitive to use, as I was able to get a pretty good mix going without even opening the manual. The basic technique is this: Select a song, load it to Deck A, hit play. You can tweak the EQ and effects with the knobs and buttons, or “scratch” using the jog wheel. The scratch effect sounds relatively realistic, but I wasn’t able to do anything too cool sounding (probably due to my lack of any real scratching skills). I wasn’t able to “play” the record by turning the jog-wheel at a constant pace either, the song would sort of pitch up and down uncontrollably and not remain at a steady tempo. I don’t know if this is a result of un-steady hands, or an effect that is put onto the track to make it more “scratchY’ sounding. Anyway, once you’ve got the one song going, you can load another song onto Deck B, and pre-listen to it by using the “Cue-Select” button.

Finally! I’m not Djing blind!!!

That single feature would make this equipment worthwhile to me, even if the rest of it sucked (it doesn’t). I was able to listen to the song over the headphones, and could control the mix headphone mix between cued song and live mix using the handy “Cue Mix” knob. Theres a “sync” button which sets the BPM to match that of the other record, and a “beat lock” button to make BPM changes only affect time and not pitch. The sync button works pretty well for matching the BPMs of two songs (as long as the two BPMs were within the range afforded by the pitch fader), but I still found it hard to get the two decks playing exactly in time with each other. You can set a cue point for the start of the track, but theres no “auto-play” feature which plays the track for you exactly on beat; you’ve got to hit play yourself at the exact right time, which I found tough as theres a very slight delay. I’m sure I’ll improve at this with practice though.

If the “Scratch” button is turned off, the jog wheels act as pitch nudge wheels, so if the two decks drift from one another, you can use the jog wheels to slightly slow down or speed up the track to get it back in time. When the track is stopped, you can use the jog wheels to quickly scroll through the track to set your cue point.

Since we’re on the topic, let talk about the Jog wheels. I was skeptical at first about how useful they’d be, as they aren’t motorized so don’t really have the same feel as real records. After using them for a while though, I think I’m really starting to like them. The feel of the wheels is extremely nice – they have a definite heft, but spin extremely smoothly, and have a nice grippy rubber top. This is in extreme contrast to the Behringer BCD-3000, which had tiny chintzy plastic wheels with almost no weight or smoothness. I found the jog wheels to do a great job for scratching, cuing, and navigating through directories. Now I just need to find a good way to integrate them with Ableton Live.

As far as the rest of the controls, they’re solid, but not as nice as the jog wheels. The volume and pitch sliders all have a nice smooth resistance to them, similar to a mixing console. The crossfader has almost no resistance to allow for fast cuts and scratching tricks, but almost feels too loose. They should’ve used a nicer crossfader for this as that’s practically the most important part of a DJ mixer. The knobs all have a nice feel and turn very smoothly with a slight resistance. I really love them in comparison to my Axiom’s knobs, which are clicky instead of smooth (I will never understand why they chose to have these kind of knobs on the Axiom, it makes any kind of effects control really choppy). There are a ton of buttons which all have a dedicated purpose within Virtual DJ, which I won’t spend the time to exhaustively list. About half of them light up with a blue LED glow, which gives some nice feedback to the user lends a futuristic look to the device. I haven’t been able to get the lights to work in Live, as apparently it requires some setup of the MIDI out port and I just haven’t had the time. It is a shame that all of the buttons couldn’t have been lit, but I think this was a limitation set by the amount of power you can draw through USB, so I can’t really blame them.

My one criticism of the buttons is that they’re a little too squishy. You have to press down relatively hard to make sure they register every single time. I don’t really see this as being a problem to most users though, as I got used to it pretty quickly. I did have one problem with the “Skip Forward” button sticking- after I unstuck it I pressed it like a 100 times and it seemed to work fine after that, but I really hope this doesn’t become a problem again or start happening with the other buttons.

I like the layout of the device, which is basically split into identical mirrored controls for each deck. The controls don’t feel cramped at all, which was a heavy criticism of the MKII. One thing I was confused by is that there are both “gain” and “volume” controls for each deck. Isn’t this redundant?

Virtual DJ LE also includes some limited effects, which I played around with for a bit while mixing songs. Looping, flanging, and beat stutter tricks are all easily accessed by the effect buttons next the EQ section. Despite its excellent control integration, I found the Virtual DJ software to be limiting (perhaps because this is the limited edition?). I’ll most likely end up getting Traktor Scratch for DJing purposes, as this seems to be a much more respected and versatile piece of software than Virtual DJ. For free software though, Virtual DJ isn’t too bad, and is a great tool for getting into the feel of mixing tracks. It definitely requires a bit more skill to create seamless mixes than Live in my opinion, but affords more features geared towards classic turntable DJing.

After playing around with Virtual DJ a while, I switched back to my old standby Ableton Live. I was at first confused that the ASIO drivers didn’t appear as an option in Live’s preferences. I then found that you have to open the DJ Console RMX settings from the task menu and set the drivers to ASIO in that. After doing this, the ASIO drivers were properly recognized by Live, and I was able to achieve 10ms latency with no glitchiness.

The RMX comes with no preset templates for Live, so I had to set the controls manually using Live’s MIDI learn feature. I was quickly able to map the sliders to control volume and crossfaders, and the knobs to control EQ. Because Ableon requires a different method of DJing than Virtual DJ, there were a lot of leftover buttons I could assign to anything I wanted. The one thing I still really need to figure out is how to get the navigation buttons to work in Live. Usually I would use the arrow keys on the keyboard to navigate the grid of clips, but the RMX navigation buttons don’t seem to work in that way. If anyone knows how to map MIDI messages to control clip selection in Live, PLEASE let me know. It will be awesome to be able to control Live 100% from the RMX without relying on the keyboard or mouse. For now though the RMX is still an excellent addition to my Live setup, providing me with the 4×4 interface I need and a wealth of programmable controls.

Conclusion:

So far, I’m extremely satisfied by the Hercules DJ Console RMX. The DJ audio interfaces I was looking at while shopping generally ranged from $200-$300, so for about $100 more I got the interface I needed plus an excellent control surface! For my needs this all-in-one DJ console is way better than having a separate audio interface and two control turntables, as the transportation and setup is much simpler. The feel of the unit is solid and professional, and in my opinion rivals the build quality of the revered VCI-100. Of course, it completely blows its predecessors and the Behringer console completely out of the water. I have yet to test this extensively in a ‘real world’ party situation, but I’ve got one lined up for tonight so I’ll let you know how it goes! Despite its few flaws, I highly recommend this to anyone needing a solid audio interface and DJ control surface.

Pros:

-extremely solid build

-shiny silver finish, and pretty blue lights!

-good audio connection options

-great jog-wheel feel

-tons of knobs and buttons in an intuitive DJ-specific layout

-good song-navigation controls

-Virtual DJ is good software for beginners

-easy to use right out of the box

-value for price

Cons:

-slightly loose feeling crossfader

-Virtual DJ software feels limited

-hard to control “scratch” effect

-kinda squishy buttons, may get stuck

Update: Check out my Hercules RMX post-review retrospective

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