Hercules RMX: Retrospective

First of all, I’d like to thank all the readers and commenters for taking an interest in my Hercules RMX review.  I had no idea when I wrote it that so many people would be reading it – I think that article alone has basically quadrupled my blog traffic! (not that there was very much traffic to begin with, haha). Its nice to know people are appreciating the stuff I’ve written, and it makes me want to write more now that I have some semblance of an audience. I just picked up an MPK49 so a review may be forthcoming if I ever get around to it…

Anyway, in regards to the review I may have to revise my opinion a bit after having spent quite some time with the thing. Don’t get me wrong – I still think its a great piece of hardware – its just there have been some performance issues I haven’t been able to get rid of that have really decreased its value in my eyse. Recently one of my readers sent me a question which illustrates this – below is that email and my response. Make of it what you will.

Hey Jacob,

Nice review!  Thank you, it was very in-depth and helpful.  I just got this myself and figuring out how to put it all together.  Finally got it to work, with all the cables and stuff you know, but my question is, you mentioned that when you played your music, you heard clicking and skipping.  I noticed that too.  How did you get to fix yours exactly?  I’m asked to play for a small group of friends this Saturday and I would hate for them to hear all the clicking when I’m playing.
Any help is appreciated!  Thank you in advance, J!

Newbie VDJ,
DJ Bones (haaaa!  the name is funny but it stuck, I’m way skinny that’s why)

---

Hey Bones,

Yeah, the skipping thing is a bitch, its actually been annoying me a lot lately. Sometimes the interface will work fine for an hour then start slowing down and stuttering for a while. I’m not sure if its the interface’s fault or some background process I have running on XP thats making my CPU chug… either way it sucks. Here are some things I’ve done to reduce the frequency of these dropouts -

• Increase the ASIO buffer size
• Turn off my wireless card
• In task manager, set the priority for my music app to “real time’
• Turn off any unnecessary background processes

Even with these fixes though I still run into trouble sometimes. Luckily I’m mostly just playing house parties for my friends though and they’re usually too drunk to care / notice. However, these issues really detract from the value of the RMX as playing in a real club situation with these problems could be disastrous.

I’m actually thinking about getting another dedicated audio interface and using the RMX as just a MIDI control surface since I like the layout so much. Its a shame such a potentially great peace of hardware is plagued with these kind of stability problems.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback, and I hope you rock the party on Saturday!

-Jacob

Is anyone else having these problems? Does anyone have fix suggestions?

UPDATE: Thanks for the suggestions guys! Updating the firmware did help a bit, though I still get some problems in Ableton Live when I’m playing too many tracks at once. I’m thinking this may be only an Ableton problem though – I’ve started using Traktor 3 and so far I’ve had zero problems with the sound no matter what I throw at it! This makes me happy.

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?