The week before NAMM is always full of teasers in the DJ industry. Generic promo trailers, blurry photos, and vague hints at groundbreaking technology abound. Today we’re seeing the start of a social campaign on Denon DJ’s Instagram page that indicates they’re likely about to announce a new all-in-one standalone piece of DJ hardware, likely to compete with Pioneer DJ’s XDJ-RX2.
Is This The “MCX Prime”?
This morning, Denon DJ posted two images to their Instagram story that reveal a new unannounced product from the company. Here’s both images in their original forms:
We highly suspect this will be a four channel standalone unit, as we predicted in December. Denon DJ has everything to gain by making this unit and competing directly with Pioneer DJ’s XDJ-RX2.
Here’s what we can tell from the photos:
- There’s a screen in the middle of the unit above the mixer section, which matches the form factor of the XDJ-RX series and gives a strong indication that it will be a standalone unit. It also breaks away from the one-screen-per-deck section layout that other InMusic models have used.
- The unit has a strong “Engine” branding on it, meaning that it will work hand-in-hand with Denon DJ’s prep software. This was a major complaint for MCX8000 users who didn’t get Engine support until September 2018.
- Denon DJ has clearly blacked out the mixer section of the unit – when you brighten up the first image (below) there’s clearly been some photo editing to hide what the unit is capable. This perhaps could indicate that the biggest reveal will be about the number of decks the unit have, and it would only be interesting if it’s not two. Feels like strong evidence that this product will be a four-deck standalone product.
- There are also two circular buttons directly to the left of the jogwheel surrounded by a square. This looks incredibly similar to the MCX8000s deck selector (below), which allowed you to change what deck the unit was controlling (but only worked in MIDI mode – the standalone functionality was limited to two decks).
- Based on the distinctive green glow of the play button in the blurry full-unit photo, Denon has ditched the mirrored layout, instead opting for both decks to have the same positioning for all controls (i.e. the play / cue buttons are at the bottom left of each deck).
There’s not much more in terms of details on this new product, but we’ll be keeping a close watch to see what comes up over the coming week – and what it looks like on the showroom floor at NAMM 2019.
