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Traktor Scratch

A mate just got this and says it the absolute sizzle - He was playing with mazi and hip-e (of hip-e and halo) and during the night they would only use that - those guys now swear by it.

The thing that looks amazing is the fact you get time coded vinyl, time coded CD's, a 8 x I/O 24b 96k bus powered soundcard with Cirrus Logic D/A's, balanced connections and on board midi!!

Also, at the flick of a single switch you can play your normal vinyl or CD direct through the mixer.

This is now my next purchase - bugger getting a seperate sound card, software etc.

Oh, and apparently it's tighter than serato scratch!

Anyone know of any downsides? I just can't find any.....

well I use m-audio Torq which offers the same at a cheaper price and it's certainly awesome.

yes i hear great things about this.

and that it blows torq out of the water

Re: Traktor Scratch

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Originally posted by DJ RANN A mate just got this and says it the absolute sizzle - He was playing with mazi and hip-e (of hip-e and halo) and during the night they would only use that - those guys now swear by it. The thing that looks amazing is the fact you get time coded vinyl, time coded CD's, a 8 x I/O 24b 96k bus powered soundcard with Cirrus Logic D/A's, balanced connections and on board midi!! Also, at the flick of a single switch you can play your normal vinyl or CD direct through the mixer. This is now my next purchase - bugger getting a seperate sound card, software etc. Oh, and apparently it's tighter than serato scratch! Anyone know of any downsides? I just can't find any.....

Those converters are outstanding! Blows torg and serato out of the water in terms of sound!
If you like the sound and the software this is what to get. If you like ableton or serato you will need torg or sratch live.
If I was going to buy a vinyl interface I would get traktor scratch!

Re: Re: Traktor Scratch

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Originally posted by Existo22 Those converters are outstanding! Blows torg and serato out of the water in terms of sound! If you like the sound and the software this is what to get. If you like ableton or serato you will need torg or sratch live. If I was going to buy a vinyl interface I would get scratch live!

i'm sorry but i cant understand what you're trying to say...

Re: Re: Re: Traktor Scratch

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Originally posted by discobiscuit i'm sorry but i cant understand what you're trying to say...

Same.

Scratch live can't play standard vinyls or CD's like Traktor scrtach though(?). Also they are the same money and the quality shoud be better with TS + and it's tighter in terms of manipulation than serato.

Re: Re: Re: Re: Traktor Scratch

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Originally posted by DJ RANN Scratch live can't play standard vinyls or CD's like Traktor scrtach though(?).

What? You're joking, right? SSL could always play normal vinyl/CDs. That's what the THRU outputs are for on the box. Traktor Scratch uses those God-awful multicore cables, which are nothing but fancy Y cables. In fact you have to use those multicore cables to connect everything. And anytime you split a signal, you loose quality.

quote:

Anyone know of any downsides? I just can't find any.....

I can name a few.

I have SSL, and owned Torq and Traktor Scratch (sold both). They all have their pros and cons. One is not right for everyone. Torq and Traktor Scratch both suffer from sticker drift in Relative mode (Torq's real bad). This is a BIG deal breaker for me as most of the "features" in DVSs only work in Relative mode (cue points, loops, etc.). SSL is the only DVS that has no sticker drift (in Relative mode, there shouldn't be sticker drift in Absolute mode in any DVS, theoretically). And what about latency? SSL still has a lower latency than TS. Granted, for mixing it doesn't amount to much, but for scratching, which TS is "supposed" to be better at cause of its 2kHz timecode, every millisecond counts.

NI's also not the best when it comes to customer service and support (anyone who's had FS1 or FS2 can contest to that), and Torq's not that great in that department either judging by the looks of their forums. Updates have been few and far in between for them (granted, TS has only been out a couple months). Hell, looks like every new update to OSX, Torq has to wait for a new patch to work. 10.4.9, Torq had a problem. 10.4.10, Torq had a problem. Hell, TS still doesn't work right on some G4 Macs. Torq still doesn't work on Vista yet.

Also given NI's past history with Final Crash, er, Scratch, that alone already gives them a bad rep in my book and for this reason alone I know many people who won't even touch Traktor Scratch, even if it is "better." So far, they haven't made you pay for minor updates, but they already said it's going to be at least $99 if you want to upgrade to Traktor 3.3, which only then will give you more features not in the basic Traktor Scratch software.

I could go on and on....but that's not to say there aren't positive things about Traktor Scratch. There certainly are some fearutes I wish SSL had that TS had, like recording your set right in the program, naming cue points, better review list history, but those are mainly minor things (to me at least).

Like I said, they all have their pros and cons. Best bet is to try them all out and see which one suits you best.

quote:

Also they are the same money

Not quite right again I see

TS = $599
SSL= $479-539 depending on where you shop
Torq = $299

Re: Re: Re: Traktor Scratch

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Originally posted by discobiscuit i'm sorry but i cant understand what you're trying to say...

Sorry I wanted to say traktor scratch

I have Torq, SSL, and Traktor Scratch, and I must say Traktor Scratch takes the cake.

Torq is a good peice of software with potential, however like one of the posts above states it's always breaking with new OS X updates. I also found the audio quality to be poor. Torq also fails to be responsive without tweaks (which make it slightly less reliable), by responsive I mean when you move the pitch slider on your resptive medium Torq will not respond quickly.

SSL worked fine for the most part, there were two problems however. Sometimes out of no where SSL would corrupt my WAV files, this is of course unacceptable (this was only like a month ago with the newest update at the time!). The audio quality from the interface was terrible as well, worse than Torq really.

Traktor Scratch has been a very good experiance for the most part for me. The software is quite solid, and the audio quality is superb not to mention support for FLAC! This enabled me to put all of my music on my laptop without worrying too much about space and quality. Now I've had one major problem which NI has been good about trying to get resolved for me, I believe I'll be exchanging the interface here in a few days. The problem is that I believe my Audio8 interface is slightly broken. Some days it works fine, some days it thinks one of the channels is missing on one of my CDJ's and therefore can't back-cue. I haven't heard of anyone having a crazy problem like this, I think I just got unlucky. So I still highly recommend Traktor Scratch. I could go on about how awesome it is, but I think you get the idea.

You raise some good points Konix, especially in regards to the previous problems with Final Scartch, but that is probably one of the main reasons the stanton partnership was abandoned.

But I have to disagree on several too. In the UK at least the cost difference between SSL and FS is bugger all and the more people I speak to the more I get the opnion that FS has lower sticker latency/drift than SLL. In dealing with NI on a professional basis both in the UK and US, have found them to be one of the better and least painful companies to deal with, either for customer hardware returns or software support.

Torq is a piece of crap though but I don't think you can blame them for not being able to keep up with the hundreds of MAC os updates, for the same reason you can't blame equipment manufacturers having all these problems with Vista.

Finally, multicore cables do not negatively affect the quality of audio reproduction - you're not "splitting the signal" at any point. they just make cable management easier, going from a some form of multipin connector (I forget which) to individual tails.

Well, maybe things are different in the UK in terms of support, but I don't really see how.

As far as latency and sticker drift, you mention FS, as in Final Scratch (2). I'm sure you meant TS as in Traktor Scratch. FS2 and TS are completely different products. In either case, SSL certainly has a lower needle drop latency then them both, and I have the waveform graphs and audio samples to prove it. SSL's needle dorp latency is 7-8ms on lowest settings. Traktor Scratch's is about 13-16ms (see nem0nic's TS review with graphs... http://nem0nic.com/ ). Total latency is also lower in SSL, at about 11ms, TS about 20ms. You don't even want to know FS2's. SSL has NO sticker drift in Relative mode. Not to say SSL didn't have sticker drift before, but they worked hard to come up with a way to eliminate it in v1.5. Traktor Scratch has sticker drift a little, and I do mean little, but it's still noticeable, but certainly not as bad as Torq.

The multicore cables do split the signal, again search the TS forums and you will see they even say it does. How could it not? You plug your turntables into the female RCA end, one side goes into the Audio8, the other side/end goes into your phono-in on the mixer. There's no phono bypass outputs on the Audio 8 like the SSL box or FS2 amp. Now, whether the signal is degraded and how much is probably negligible, but I noticed normal vinyl just didn't sound as good with TS's multicore cables compared to directly plugging the TTs strait into the mixer, or even using SSL's THRU outputs. Then there's Torq, yikes, playing normal vinyl through Torq is horrible.

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