Numark DDS80 Review

The Numark DDS 80 is a rack-mountable system of two pieces: a digital controller and an additional unit housing a DVD-ROM and 80GB hard drive.

What was appealing to me about this unit is that it was advertised as being “Future Proof” and able to accommodate a variety of music sources whether it be from external hard drive, USB flash drive, iPod, laptop, etc. The DDS controller has 3 USB ports which enable you to hook up, in theory, 3 additional music sources. In practice however, you will probably only have a single port available to you for additional music source since one port will be needed by the DVD-ROM/80GB hard drive unit, another port will be needed by the provided keyboard. This leaves only one more port available. To get around this limitation, you could of course use a powered USB hub to provide more ports, but this increases the odds of connection issues or problems, requires another power adapter in your setup (the DDS has it’s own plug and the DVD-ROM/hard drive unit also has it’s own power supply and plug). So before you know it, you’ve got power cords, power supplies and RCA cables to manage.

The DVD-ROM/hard drive unit also has a single USB port on the face of the unit, just below the power button.

The DDS80 has two of the USB ports located rather inconveniently on the back (Numark calls it the “front” of the unit in the description of the DDS80 but refers to it as the “back panel” in the documentation. Confusing? Yes it is? And misleading. If you intend to use flash drives as your primary source of music as I have chosen, this restricts the way in which you can place the controller in your equipment rack. For instance, if you prefer to have your mixer above the controller, then you will not be able to easily access the two USB ports on the back of the DDS controller. That menas you must have the DDS80 be above the mixer to enable easy access to the USB ports and that is not how I would prefer to have it be arranged. The DDS has the third USB port on the top left corner of the unit. I don’t find this particularly good placement either because if you have a flash drive plugged into that port, you end up having it sticking straight up, likely with a bright LED activity light on the flash drive blinking away all night long. It is very easy to bump it while working and most troublesome is its placement immediately adjacent to the jog/scratch wheel. It really gets in the way particularly when you are aggressively manipulating the jog/scratch wheel.. You could work around this somewhat by using a USB extension cable or the previously mentioned powered USB hub but that is not ideal.

The controls of the DDS80 will be familiar to most DJ’s. I actually am glad that Numark didn’t fill this device with a bunch of mostly useless special effects functions. What is included works well: pitch-shift (up to 25% and down to 100%), key lock, scratch, loop and really fast track lookup. For me, the key lock feature is incredibly useful. You can speed up a song without the key of the music changing and that means no more “chipmunks” vocals. You do have to use some discretion with this though because if you pitch a song down more than about 10% you start to get objectionable digital garbling. PItching up is more forgiving and the digital distortion is not nearly so noticeable. This is not a problem with the Numark, it is inherent in digital playback.

The scratch function works surprisingly well and if that’s you’re style, you will find it useful. The scratch wheel is not weighted though so it may or may not have the right “feel” for you.

At first glance a big disappointment for me was the loop function. You are limited to a single loop “in point” and it took a while for me to figure out how to micro-adjust the loop in and out points. Your first instinct is just to start the song and then hit the Loop In button at the point you want to start your loop and then hit the Loop Out button where you want to loop to end. This method is not all that accurate though. It’s all too easy to be a fraction of a beat off and that of course makes the loop sound terrible. But the secret is to pause the deck once you get to you the point where you’d like to start the loop, then use the jog wheel to get precisely where you want to be. Then hit your Loop In button. Start the song again using the play button and pause the song just about where you want the loop out point to be, then use the jog wheel to get to the precise out point and then hit the Loop Out button. This way you can get your loop exactly how you want it. Some loops are easier to set than others and you may not have to use the “precise” way every time, but it’s good to know that you can use that method if need be.

I was also happy to discover that once your music library has been run through the included Numark Librarian software, the music cues up in the player in an instant. It’s really really quick to load and that surprised me. However, be forewarned that you MUST have Numark Librarian create the library file or you will not be able to enjoy this lightning fast cue time since without the library file, the DDS takes much more time to load and discover the start point of the song. You’ll always want to run Numark Librarian on your music library since it also calculates the BPM of your songs among other things.

The Beatkeeper function is somewhat of a gimmick but I must say it does have some value. It’s virtually impossible to see in bright light though. So if you’re outside in bright light or inside in a brightly lit room doing a gig, you won’t be able to see the dimly lit LED’s for the Beatkeeper. But the intent of the Beatkeeper is to give a visual representation of the beat of the currently playing song as well as the beat of the song in the other deck. Thus it makes it possible to sync the two songs using only the visual aid provided by the Beatkeeper. Do I use it? No. Would I ever use it? Maybe. But most of the time I’m just going to beat-mix using the method I’ve always used and that is listening to my headphones and making the mix without the assistance of a flashing LED indicator.

Numark uses the Crate and Playlists to help you organize and put your most popular music into easily accessed “holding” areas. For instance you can make several playlists for “types” of music. As an example you could make one playlist for your top 10 songs and another playlist for your top 25 slow dance songs. You create a playlist by first naming the playlist then adding songs to the playlist from your music library on the DDS. The playlists are retained in the Library of whichever media device contains the Library from which the playlist was created and are available to you every time you turn on your DDS and mount the appropriate media device.

The DDS80 has not been a huge seller for Numark primarily because of the advent of competent software based laptop systems such as Serato. However for those DJ’s not wanting to deal with laptops and the hassles that can ensue using them, the DDS80 provides a robust solution that doesn’t take up a lot of space. You can pick up the Numark DDS 80 for under $800.