Yesterday I went to Earls court London to go to the Plasa 2004 exhibition. I was there specifically to look at DJ gear. Not that I need any new kit or anything, the stuff I have is pretty much top of the range and perfectly fine for home use.
I suppose getting to see the uk premier of the Technics SL-DZ1200 digital CDJ turntable and recorded an excusive video of them being demonstrated AND getting to have a go on one of the six working prototypes at the time… yeah getting to do and see that last year gave me good incentive to go again.
I didn’t stay for long, but I saw and had a go on some damn cool stuff.

It seems that the future of DJ’ing is in the AV DVD mixing world, Numark have an AV mixer and DVD erm, players 🙂
The most impressive equipment that I had a go on was the DVJ-X1 from pioneer…. quite simply WOW. A piece of equipment that lets you scratch a DVD and jump around with hot cue points… its basically exactly the same as the CDJ-1000 but for DVD’s.
I was playing around with a DVD that they had which was some dance music with a kung-fu movie for a music video. Very very cool, and fun 🙂

I can also reveal exclusively (maybe) that pioneer are intending to release a whole suite of AV mixing equipment including an AV mixer and probably an AV effects unit too.
I would love to get a go on that kind of stuff but there are several problems:
1. A single DVD deck costs £2500, and
2. Most of the music I like to mix doesn’t have music videos.
Although it has to be said that with the right software and a bit of imagination (and probably some retro kung-fu films;)) you can make your own music videos, which would be great fun 🙂