Rotary mixers are hot. This week at NAMM, Headliner LA (one of the Mixware family of brands) have noticed and announced a new product this week, the R2 mixer. It’s a 2-channel rotary DJ mixer, with high/low pass filters, isolator EQs, and a price point that pretty much seals the deal: $399.
NAMM is the once-a-year music manufacturer industry convention that’s been around since the 1930s. Let’s be honest: the days of big DJ product releases at NAMM are largely in the past. No longer am I trying to sneak onto the convention hall floor before it opens to leak products (2012 was quite a year). Even so, there are always a few cool things that deserve spotlighting – and the R2 absolutely fits the bill this year.
A bit more about Headliner’s R2 Rotary Mixer
This isn’t a complicated product – it’s a two channel mixer. It’s rotary. It’s got filters, toggled below the big chunky volume knobs on each channel. It looks pretty good for this price point too – real wood sides, ALPs potentiometers, and a classic control layout.
We could see this being a great second household mixer for DJs who have setup that they don’t want to have set up with a club mixer all the time. We didn’t get to hear the phono pre-amps (the unit at NAMM was set up with CDJs), but there’s phono in, XLR booth and main outs, and RCA connection for everything else.
The only downside that we saw of this product was the external power supply – it’s has a three-prong mini-XLR style plug, so don’t lose it! Removing the power supply from the mixer might improve any audio interference a little bit – so that’s a positive.
You might be wondering about the name, R2. It naturally stands for Rotary 2 (and if it does well, we think a R4 with four channels would be a likely follow up). But the team at Headliner/Mixware couldn’t resist making a very custom version of their product for release that references the unintentional Star Wars namesake:
No word on when these will be in stock yet – but if you’re interested in getting one, let us know in the comments below and we’ll make it happen in the DJTT store.
We’re at NAMM this week for a day or two to check out the new stuff – our Instagram has had some solid action this morning. Keep an eye out and we’ll post anything else new we see!
