After browsing for records over at Turntable Lab the other day I wound up buying one of these iKey USB recorders. I had been planning on recording a new mix for a number of weeks, but I never seemed to have the time and/or energy since I’m already juggling a day job and dj’ing a few nights a week, so recording a live set seemed like a good idea. The device is super easy to use, you simply connect it to the output of the dj mixer, choose the bitrate you want to record at, and hit record. Done. I tried using it for the first time last night, but for some reason it stopped recording after 45 minutes without me noticing, which was annoying since I had been quite excited about the set I had put on. I must have hit the record button again by accident, since that’s how you stop the recording. The best part is you can record the audio to either a USB drive, or directly to your iPod, which is perfect if you want to listen to your set on the drive home.  I’m going to give it another shot in a couple nights, so if all goes well I might post a short mix soon.

Before I get into the actual review part of this post, I wanted to share some personal history on how I came to own one of these since it was the first real mixer I ever owned, and was instrumental in the progression of my own skills.

I first started dj’ing after buying a 2 channel Gemini mixer from a friend who had recently upgraded. I spent the first two months destroying my mother’s record collection by using the an old record player we had at home and attempting to duplicate the scratches I had observed my friend perform. Naturally I quickly became frustrated with the constant skipping, and headed back to my friends house in search of advice. After pointing out that I needed some better turntables and needles, my friend let me use his new mixer which was a Vestax PMC05. Although I still had no real skills at that point, I quickly started reproducing similar sounds to those my friend could make, simply on account of the smoothly gliding faders on his new mixer, which was a sharp contrast to the stiff feel of the mixer I had at home. Feeling inspired a month later, I headed over to a music store and bought a couple Technic 1200’s and a Vestax PMC07 Pro. From that moment on I was hooked on mixing music and scratching, and I attribute it in a lot of ways to the quality of the PMC07 mixer, which I wound up using for over 7 years, and still own to this day!

Now 12 years later, here is why I love this mixer, and also some reasons why I hate it.

Like most Vestax 2 channel Vestax mixers the 07 Pro was very much created for dj’s who liked to scratch. It came with a Vestax pcv fader that claimed to be able to survive 2 million passes before audible audio loss, and in my experience it easily surpassed that claim. The mixer had a session in jack(RCA) which meant I could plug another mixer into mine and run both through the same speakers, a common feature today but somewhat novel back then. Another useful feature was that it had both RCA and TRS master outs, so I didn’t have to worry about using adapters that could reduce sound quality when doing gigs at new places. And most importantly, the thing was built like a tank. Despite the fact that it got dropped, slammed, and spilled on with beer more times than I can remember, the thing just kept working. The PMC07 certainly had some drawbacks though, some of which I didn’t even realize until I started using other mixers. First of all, it had no monitor output, which was just strange. There was always the option of using the unused master output jack, but then I had no control of the monitor volume as it was dependent on the master volume. Also, while the cross fader was great for scratching, its volume curve(despite being adjustable) was not as smooth as I wanted. Another issue I had with it from a mixing point of view, was that the knobs for the three band EQ moved up and down, as opposed to being rotary knobs which are much more precise and easy to use when mixing tracks rapidly. Finally, it had these massive panning knobs, which seemed cool at first, but in reality were pretty useless. Overall I highly recommend this mixer to anyone more interested in scratching. There are certainly newer and better mixers out there now, but this one is still worth a few bucks.

And for good measure, here are the specs: