Old school Hip Hop DJs like myself have watched the seminal classic Wild Style movie and marvelled at the way the OGs used to rock. But for the gearheads like myself, there has been a longstanding question — what the hell is that mixer that Grandmixer D. ST. is using in the Amphitheatre jam? So on behalf of DJpedia, I set about tapping into our considerable resources and put out a call to action to help identify this mixer. And now we have.
If you check the original story, we ended up with close to 160 comments charting the gamut of old school mixers from waaaay back in the day. DJs and manufacturers alike chipped in after digging deep in their memory banks. My inbox lit up with a stream of wooden cased beauties in all manner of conditions. Numark and Gemini fought over ownership, but couldn’t quite deliver the goods. We even reached out to Grandmixer D. ST. (now Grandmixer DXT) himself, but he couldn’t give us a definitive answer.
But this week, responding to a Throwback Thursday post, Vin Riviera finally identified the mixer on the Numark facebook page. Karl Detken, Numark’s new Director of Marketing stopped by the DJWORX comments to confirm it, and sent me the above photo to finally nail it once and for all. It’s the ELI-SL9090, but didn’t come up in the comments, and nor does it really appear online either. So it’s very lucky for us that we have the picture to confirm it.
Just to be sure, I did an overlay in Photoshop and made this GIF. There are slight marking differences, but feature-wise, it’s identical.
So DJpedia — you can stop searching for the name, and start searching for the hardware for your archive. If this helps, here’s a current auction for the ELI SL-9090X model. Looks a tad worse for wear though.