Hercules DJ Console RMX review

The DJ Console RMX is Hercules's flagship DJ product, and it can do more than simply mix MP3s.

You can connect its rear audio ports either to turntables or powered sources such as CD or MP3 players. At the front, the console has a microphone input and a headphone output for monitoring. Its sturdy steel and brushed aluminium chassis bristles with knobs, sliders, blue-lit buttons and a pair of jog dials. The controls are well positioned and easy to use. You can use the jog dials either to scratch tracks or navigate to the right point in a cued track. Sliders enable you to change tempo, pitch and volume, and crossfade between tracks.

The RMX comes with Atomix VirtualDJ 5 DCJ for Windows and Mac OS X. This is a light version of VirtualDJ that has been customised to work with the console. While many sound cards and USB audio devices come with trial versions that have been crippled so as to be almost useless, this is a brilliant and fully functional digital mixing interface. The console also works with other DJ software, although you may have to assign manually some of the MIDI channels that control the sliders and buttons.

The key to mixing tracks into a seamless flow of music is beat matching, where you alter the speed of the track you're mixing in to synchronise it with the one that's playing. VirtualDJ scans every track to analyse its tempo. It can use this tempo analysis to warn you if a track is too fast or slow to mix with the current track. The main mixer screen displays scrolling waveforms of the loaded tracks, along with visual beat markers that make them easier to synchronise. The Beat Lock buttons on the Console lock the tracks' pitch so you can use the pitch slider to change just the tempo. If you have trouble matching beats, you can press the Sync button to do it automatically, although this isn't flawless. Buttons on the console trigger effects, including loops, pitch bends, a flanger and a beat grid generator that creates drum fills based on the track's bass line.

Sound quality was excellent, with clear, precise reproduction of bass frequencies, mid-tones and high notes. This can show up the failings of tracks encoded at low bit rates, so you'll have to use high-quality audio files. We would have liked to see support for lossless audio formats, but high-quality variable bit rate MP3s still sounded great.

We loved the DJ Console RMX and VirtualDJ DCJ software. If you've ever used any software or hardware DJ tools before, it won't be long before you're used to the equipment and blending tracks seamlessly. Along with a laptop loaded with MP3s, this is everything you need to mix a full set, whether you're hooked into a stereo at a friend's party or plugged into the PA at a club.