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With their history
in audio spanning generations of professional studio applications it
was surprising and refreshing to see Tascam, a major player in the
music industry, move into the disc jockey market. Most companies
entering the this market choose to start at the bottom and work their
way up, but Tascam, drawing on forty years of technology and
experience, chose to start at the top.
Tools
Tascam's CD-302
dual cd player gives the professional disc jockey all the tools
they have ever wanted at their fingertips. I could see by the
design that Tascam had done it's homework before going to production.
Out Of The Box
Out of the box the
CD-302 consists of two pieces, the controller and the deck units. The
controller is a little over eight inches high and is setup for that
standard 19" rack mount. Vinyl jocks with a turntable coffin
will be happy to know that the controller can be separated into two
units and with the supplied legs attached, they sit at the same
height as a 1200 MK2. The deck unit is a standard three rack
spaces and also will fit in a 19" rack. The CD-302 has a very
road worthy case amounting to what I would say 75% of it's total weight.
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 Advanced
beat matching control with large, automatic BPM meter
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True instant start
- ±32% tempo adjustment
without changing pitch
- ±32% pitch adjustment
without changing tempo
- On-board 10 second sampling
on each unit
- Turntable emulation with
brake function and scratch play
- 10 second shock RAM buffer
- Seamless loop function
- Incremental play function
- Fader start function
- Detachable remote control
for each player
- Separate RCA unbalanced
outputs for each player
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Features
The controllers
have a user friendly layout that even my wife's smaller hands could
navigate. Scanning over the major control features, skip, search,
cue, and play/pause are neatly placed in their own section to the
left, a large jog knob is placed to the right of these buttons, and
the 100mm pitch/tempo slider is to the far right. A bright florescent
display for your main feedback dominates the top and a smaller
display for BPMs is situated just under it to the left. Just below
the key display is a layout of buttons for tempo sync, key sync, tap
and BPM. In the first few minutes of operating the CD-302, I can tell
by the feel that quality parts were used in it's production.
The CD-302 has a
laundry list of features and from what I could tell, they are still
being added (New Function V1.10 addendum). First off for the
turntablist out there, click the scratch button and you will
find the job knob gives you some of the best sounding
"scratches" you have heard from a cd player. The large
weighty rubberized knob gives you a tactical feel as you move it back
and forth reminiscent to a record being scratched. This
feature also gives you a tactical way to locate cue points. Click the
brake and you get the equivalent of shutting off a turntable.
It might take some getting used to, but it could be the answer some
diehard vinyl spinners are looking for. Pitch controls can sometimes
be problematic on a cd player but Tascam has taken a new approach to
pitch control with time-stretching. Time-stretching, a feature
that is mostly found on studio audio processors, gives you the
ability to change the tempo of the music without changing the musical
pitch or change the musical pitch without changing the tempo. All
this without a loss of musical clarity.
The Mix
So you want to
mix? It was as easy as using the on board tempo sync or tapping in
the tempo by hand. Once a deck has the tempo of two tracks, you
can set either of the decks to be a slave and the CD-302 will
automatically match the tempo and pitch of the slave deck to the
master deck. If the tempos are on, it works very well. One click of
the beat sync button and the CD-302 will do it's best to
automatically line up the beats of the selected deck to the other
deck. The manual states that you should be aware that sometimes the
type of recorded material on one or both decks may mean it will take
a long time to synchronize and sometimes synchronization might not be
possible, but I never had a song it couldn't at least get a little
close on. An excellent feature.
The sampling
feature is up to par with the rest of this unit giving you a full 10
seconds of high-fidelity audio sampling. Complete with editable IN
and OUT features, forward, reverse, tempo adjusted, key adjusted,
looped, and not looped, it has the flavor of sampling to satisfy even
the pickiest DJ.
Functions
We move on to the
key pad located just above the jog knob. They are not there just for
track selection. This pad you might say is the heart of the CD-302.
You can adjust and personalize the CD-302 to suit your needs by using
these keys and the jog knob. You may access and adjust a wide array
of internal functions that include: voice reduction, braking time,
auto cue, timer play, auto ready, output level, jog knob resolution,
relay play, disc tray auto close, sleep mode, all of the special
sampling functions and more. These keys can also be turned into
instant function keys. With the click of the clear and the enter key,
the key pad is transformed on the fly to controls for the sampler,
brake, blend, and voice reduce function. Just added with the V1.10
model, you may hold the clear key down and click the enter key a
couple of times and the pad becomes a holder for up to 5 cue points.
Other traditional
features of the latest professional cd players are also included in
the CD-302. Anti-shock memory of 10 seconds, viable percentage pitchs
of 8%, 16%, and 32%, a time feature that is settable, and single play mode.
Opinion
Tascam has a
beautiful new baby with the CD-302. It is packed with most every
feature they could think of and more. It's sound quality is terrific
and when I sat down with it, I felt as if I was test driving a
piece of high-end studio equipment. I believe the Tascam CD-302 dual
cd player needs a new name. Instead of calling it a cd player, it
needs to be called a digital audio control center.
http://www.proaudioreview.com |
