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So I bought the xponent a couple months ago and I've had a lot of fun with it around the house.
It is more of a high-end "toy", but I can't be all that negative about it.
I think it's one of those great solutions that works straight out of the box. All the buttons are pre-assigned to work with torq. You just install torq, the driver, plug-in headphones, RCA outputs, AC power, and USB to your computer. Unless you've already invested a few hundred dollars into mixers and other equipment, I think the money is well worth it as a "starter kit." Otherwise, the other kits would still require things like an external audio card.
I've never personally owned a real pro setup, but I've always had access to all sorts of friends' pro equipment including the most current setups with serato. This just has never been big enough of a hobby for me to invest too much money into equipment. I would be using the pro setups if out in public.
So I think the xponent could be cool for friends' house parties and good to learn a few of the fundamentals, but not much more beyond that. Actually, you can probably easily outperform some crap djs who invest thousands of dollars and still suck. Unfortunately, I don't think the xponent could be taken seriously out in public... first and foremost due to the image/elitist perception thing. Although, if you use the excuse that you are using the xponent for portability reasons, then it could be more "acceptable"... like if you take it on spring break to some rented villa in mexico to play for your friends. Though I still think that if you were up in the dj booth and no one saw what you were using, you can easily play your local bar on a weekday (but that's me talking from San Francisco, where any random bar has a dj 7 days a week).
I also agree with a previous point that you shouldn't be fooled into thinking that you can transition to a more professional setup overnight.
Build quality is pretty good for being plastic, buttons are a good heavy rubber, and button clicks feel solid. I would just worry about transporting this without some sort of a case... there are just too many knobs and faders to get caught on something.
I've run it on both a macbook and a PC, and surprisingly the PC ran torq more smoothly after extended periods of time. After a constant extended session of maybe a couple hours, the sound on the mac did a bit of that too-small-of-an-audio-buffer-size miniscule "skipping". But I think I just need to "optimize" and clean up my mac a bit.
Software could be better. Just doesn't seem as pro or elegant as something like serato or even traktor. But has never crashed on me either. In context of everything else I've written above, sound quality isn't that bad. Built-in effects could be used in some fun creative ways.
I'm happy with my purchase, but I also don't really have any intentions of doing anything more than a house party and that's if I wasn't able to borrow some equipment.
If you are starting from scratch, and are not sure if you plan to pursue the hobby any further, then it's a good buy. But if you want to slowly build up to a nice set up, then there might be other ways to do it like traktor + external audio card + nice mixer (your big first investment).
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