the Lab NAMM round up continues…
Akai’s APC 40 Ableton controller was probably the most hyped production / perfomance tool of 2009. To follow-up, Akai is releasing the little brother APC 20. Here’s a video of the APC 20 in action:
Monster’s Beats By Dre headphone line took the market by storm. This year, Monster is releasing Spin model especially for DJing. In their R&D process, the Monster team interviewed as many DJs as they could, and came up with some great new features. Here’s some quick points.
- firstly, the joints are all metal, these will not break. Check out the pic above.
- there’s two input connections for the removable cord, one on each ear. the headphones recognize which input is open, and automatically turns the free input into an output, so you can connect a second pair of headphones, etc.
- the earphone pads have an anti-bacterial agent for your sweaty sets and can be removed and washed!
- specially tuned to maximize mids and highs, less lows for mixing
also for the Diddy fans (looking at you, Boy Genius), they’re going to release Diddy Beats model later this year.
Korg follows up their bestselling Kaossilator pocket synth with the Kaossilator Pro. These small, tactile controllers and synths seem to be the new thing. In addition to using it as a stand-alone synth / sampler / beat machine, you could feasibly control your setup with this, while getting the great Kaosspad style controls. quick points:
- double the preset sounds
- sampling + looping
- 4 sample banks
- MIDI compatible
- built-in vocoder
along similar lines of the Kaossilator Pro, check out this piece by Teenage Engineering. You can tell this thing is a labor of love for these guys, as they demo’d the hell out of it for me. It was really cool mix of new school and old school drum machine / controller / synth, and it looks cool as hell. It’s still unfinished, but look for it to cost $600+.
the Lab can take partial credit for this. leading with our EXCLUSIVE white L-Stand, Odyssey is launching a full line of colored L-Stands. Check out the yellow and purple Lakers combo.
lastly, I just got word that the Pioneer CDJ-1000, the 1200 of CD turntables, has been discontinued. We still have some in stock if you’re interested, but we expect the remaining inventory to go quickly.
PART ONE OF NAMM ROUND-UP HERE
