Denon Announce Motorised-Platter Player SC5000M Prime
2 min readOne would expect the 9th of August (the day after “808” day) to be a break from gear announcements. Instead, we have some fantastic news. This generation of professional DJing has been dominated by the standard CDJ layout, whether by Pioneer, of the recent Denon power move with the SC5000 Prime player, we have not seen many variations from the standard CDJ template. Today’s news, however, brings us something a bit different…
There has been very little in the way of traditional vinyl in recent times, with more DJs adopting the reasoning that vinyl is too limited to DJ the sets our audiences expect today. True or not, we know that CDJs and controllers dominate the industry now, and we also know that vinyl is still popular enough to sell products.
You may have seen the Rane 12, a controller that takes the best from the vinyl world and puts it into a controller, this has its limitations though. For starters, it does not play music on its own, it still requires a computer, secondly, while it offers significantly more control than a turntable, it still doesn’t compete with the standard gear in clubs.
This is where the SC5000M comes in. Basically, from what we can see, it is just the same as the SC5000 Prime player, but with a motorised platter and vinyl surface. If you have paid attention to the media coverage of the original SC5000, then you will know that feature-wise, it cripples even the most fully featured Pioneer CDJs.
Now with the choice of vinyl or classic CDJ feels, Denon has created more choice for the DJ community without compromising the features.
If the pricing of the original SC5000 is anything to go by, Pioneer is in trouble. Coming in at several hundred pounds cheaper than Pioneer’s roughly equivalent CDJs, Denon managed to undermine the previously unmatched monopoly. If this trend continues, we can expect to see a fully featured CDJ equivalent, unmatched with a traditional vinyl feel, for cheaper than a CDJ2000 Nexus 2.
