freeform goodness

Hm, I never did any mixing of that kind. Probably because I'm not too much into electronic or rap music where these techniques of treating vinyl badly are used. For other music just playing the songs won't usually be too bad. I also suspect I wouldn't have the patience or dexterity for that kind of mixing. (If, on the other hand I liked the music, I would have the patience, I suppose and dexterity frequently seems to be mainly a matter of practice...) It's probably good to not get one of those DJ turntables for home use as they give you bad value for money when used for anything but DJing. Argh, incoherent rambling... have to go and sleep now.

I've tried it occasionally (I have many friends who are electronic music and/or hip hop DJs) and the one thing that immediately strikes you is how much harder it is to do than it looks. The 1200s aren't designed for home use -- it's interesting to look at the design tradeoffs they made. The deck has an almost ridiculously strong and durable motor and gear assembly, which they certainly need as the workhorse equipment in hot, foggy, dirty clubs worldwide. Likewise, they're built so that the most frequently abused components (sliders, pots, cartridge headshells) are completely modular and can be swapped in and out in seconds. This coincides a bit with our quality discussion of a few weeks ago. The SL-1200 is essentially a 20-year old design that's barely changed at all.

the one thing that immediately strikes you is how much harder it is to do than it looks.

I never supposed it should be easy. Even without beat-perfect mixing, finding a good succession of songs can be tricky. Now imagine your choice is narrowed down by the speed, not just the style, of the previous song and you'll have to get the cueing perfectly right. Scary. Although I'm pretty sure it's mainly a question of practise.

I'd consider most important that you like and can relate to the music you're playing - which essentially makes such techniques mostly useless for me, considering my taste. Although, I have to admit that I've been tempted to try just for the heck of it :)

The 1200s aren't designed for home use -- it's interesting to look at the design tradeoffs they made.

Surely, they're quite well-buil. And I still find their acceleration amazing. The biggest tradeoff, however, is their sound. They just don't sound good. While this may not be much of an issue on a club's PA, where there's a lot of distortion around any (and IMO needs to be around), this can be quite annoying at home.

A friend of mine got a 1200 a few years ago for home use, the main selling point being it's durability. He doesn't like to look after things a lot, so having an 'indestructible' record player seemed a good idea. He's listening to music a lot. And while the durability of the 1200 hasn't disappointed him yet, the sound does.

In addition, the 1200 is quite expensive. It seems to be almost the price of a P3 these days and even less than half of the money will get you a cheap Project turntable which sounds a lot better. It doesn't have the 'DJ' appeal though, which is probably what many people go for, regardless of the sound.

The SL-1200 is essentially a 20-year old design that's barely changed at all.

Nothing wrong about that, I suppose. The LP12 is allegedgly a 30 year old design and it kicks ass. It's just got an unfortunate extra zero on its price tag...

P.S. I hope my html tags go through your software just fine
P.P.S. You seem to have fixed the overlap thing.
P.P.P.S. Now, if this very textarea had a couple of extra lines in height, those of us who like writing epic works could more easily see and edit what they've written.
P.P.P.P.S. So for the time being, I'll use this as an excuse for incoherence and typos :)

Most of your HTML should survive unscathed. I made the textarea bigger as well (I couldn't think of a reason not to)

I haven't done any close listening with 1200s versus any other turntables, I suspect there might be some deliberate signal coloring introduced that emphasizes certain frequencies for club use. My own turntable is an ancient (but well made) consumer Technics deck that I got for the princely sum of $20 in the late 80's or early 90's, when it was quite easy to get a nice turntable really cheaply when a few idiots bandwagon jumpers dumped all their vinyl and turntables after CDs took over. It's served me well, though I'm hardly an audiophile.

Now imagine your choice is narrowed down by the speed, not just the style, of the previous song and you'll have to get the cueing perfectly right.

I think that's where the new software like Traktor is supposed to help. They use DSP techniques to help speed up and slow down music without changing it's pitch, so it's theoretically easier to make music recorded at different tempos match up.

Ah, very nice - lots of space here - and not much to say ;)

I suspect there might be some deliberate signal coloring introduced

That would be really bad, wouldn't it? The job of record player is to get the music out of the record and into the wire and no distortion of any sort - deliberate or not. People can (and do) have extra EQs to do whatever distortion of the frequencies they want.

Apparently, one problem with DJ-turntables is that they have direct transmission. Most, if not all, good (sounding) record players have a belt drive. Apart from that I suspect that building the machine in a solid way probably forbids the use of certain more flimsy and sensitive parts.

I got for the princely sum of $20 in the late 80's or early 90's

It should be very hard to get bad value for money at that price :)

I think that's where the new software like Traktor is supposed to help. They use DSP techniques to help speed up and slow down music without changing it's pitch, so it's theoretically easier to make music recorded at different tempos match up.

To me that sounds a bit like cheating... and like replacing skill and a general feeling for the music by technology.

While I don't doubt that someone who's already good at this kind of DJing will do a good job with that kind of program as well, I always a the creepy suspicion with these kind of products that the benefit we (as in 'the discriminating public') see in the form of people who are good at the job doing even better is much less than the damage done in people who are absolutely clueless having a go at it, just because it's so easy that they 'can do it'. Which of course they can't. I suppose even I could get going with such a program after a few hours of fiddling around. I would still lack any background on the music etc.

There seems to be a fine line between technology that actually enables people to do new things and technology that lets all the morons in. Probably there's no line at all...

P.S. Never short of the things we call 'suggestions' here at euphemisms-r-us, I'd like to suggest that your RSS feed actually linked to the entries permalink (i.e. the page with the comments field) rather than the main page.

Actually, the RSS 2.0 feed (and the RSS 1.0 and Atom feeds as well) links to the single-entry page with the comments field. Looking at the XML, only the RSS 0.91 feed points to the date-ordered page. The tag in my has been pointing to the RSS 2.0 feed for about the last month, but you probably subscribed longer ago than that. the direct url is http://www.freeke.org/ffg/index.rss20

The 0.91 feed is generated directly by Blosxom, I control the others.

I see. I re-subscribed (using auto-discovery of course) and everything seems fine now. [How long did it take you to figure this out, btw? Sounds like one of those hard-to-pinpoint problems.] Yet another reason to only offer one feed, I guess. I never saw the point of having several, as all of them seem to be capable of doing the job equally well.

It wasn't that tough -- I just looked at all the feeds in "more" :)

Blosxom includes the 0.91 feed "for free" as it's default feed for syndication. I added the other feeds because 0.91's a bit anemic as a feed spec -- there's no provision for representing post times, so if you ever look at a .91 feed in an aggregator you'll notice the posts don't have a timestamp -- definitely suboptimal. As a matter of fact, it was a post from Brent Simmons that prompted me to add the other feeds -- he mentioned some upcoming features that undated feeds wouln't be able to take advantage of. I added both 1.0 and 2.0 because I wanted not to take sides in the Great RSS Format War. I added the Atom feed because it's fun and brand-new and I'm a hopeless geek.