Link: Reloop – Price: $599 /€499 /£425
Preface
This review has been written by DJ Pegasus aka Sean Pappalardo, who is the controller developer for Mixxx. Thus you’ll find comparisons to the open source Mixxx software in this review, which provides the fullest picture, as well as giving an alternative to the bundled Serato DJ Intro and Virtual DJ 7 LE software.
Introduction
To this American, Reloop was an unfamiliar brand before coming to live in Germany. And even when I first got here, Reloop struck me as a European Gemini if you will, focusing on price-conscious lookalike products. But in the last year or so, Reloop has been producing higher quality products containing some of their own innovations, and making a fair bit of noise about it too. The new Terminal Mix 4 controller is their latest such offering and it’s a high-quality, intuitively laid-out unit that provides MIDI control over four decks, three effect parameters per deck, smart loops, hot cues and samplers. It is class-compliant so it requires no MIDI or audio drivers and shows up right away on Linux too, ready to go.
In the box
First, the glossy photo-covered box itself is impressive, and handily lists all of the key features on the side incase you’re comparing in the shop. Upon opening it, you’re greeted with a box-sized poster telling you to “CHECK IN AT TERMINAL MIX 4″ on a train-station style display. Cute. Flip it over though and you’ve got yourself a great quick-reference guide helping you get oriented very quickly. Nice touch! It even includes shots of the front and back panels, showing at a glance that it includes balanced 1/4″ and unbalanced RCA master outs, a separate RCA booth out, a single line/phono switchable input, and two headphone connectors, one 1/8″ and one 1/4″ so you don’t need to carry around an adapter for your pair of choice. We also see that its 1/4” microphone input (as well as the line/phono input on the back) can each be routed to the software for further processing or directly to the master output, which is of course handy if your computer messes up or you otherwise want to work apart from the computer. Also included is a full-size instruction manual in multiple languages, a 1-meter USB data cable (with ferrite bead to suppress glitch-inducing electrical noise,) a Reloop sticker, and a DVD containing both Serato DJ Intro and Virtual DJ 7 LE, an ASIO driver, and a sampling of LoopMasters loops. Color me impressed! My demo unit did not include a power adapter, but I had no issues without it, so I’m assuming that’s only needed if you’re connecting through an un(der)powered USB hub.
I found the included USB cable to be too short to place the Terminal Mix 4 to the right of my 14″ laptop, whose USB ports are on the left. A 2-meter cable would have been nice to alleviate this problem and allow for greater flexibility, especially if you work some distance from your laptop.
The controller
“Why grandma, what big wheels you have!” “The better to scratch with, my dear!”
The first thing I noticed in pulling the 10.4-lb (4.7-kg) controller out of the box is that the aluminum wheels are alot bigger than they appear in photos. They’re 5.5 inches in diameter, making scratching a much more pleasant experience than on smaller wheels. Go ahead, grab a ruler and some paper and draw yourself a 5.5″ (14cm) diameter circle to see for yourself just how big that is. Nice, right? The wheels move easily despite being metal, yet have a good amount of braking. I also really like the surface: it’s grippy enough to hang on to but not grooved so as not to dig into your fingertips under heavy scratching (a complaint I had with the VMS4’s grooved wheel surface.) They probably won’t work well with greasy fingers, but neither would vinyl. One possible downside is that the rings look to be painted on so I wondered about them eventually wearing off, but they were unfazed by being scratched hard with a fingernail so I’d say this is nothing to worry about and the rings should remain intact for years.
Proudly designed in Germany
The second thing I noticed is that Reloop is very proud of its identity. The logo is featured on every surface at least once including at the center of the wheels and even on the fader caps! The high-resolution (14-bit) long-throw (100mm) pitch faders are the exceptions and instead have concave edges as found on classic gear (like the SL-1200.) This doesn’t bother me any (in fact it makes them comfortable to manipulate precisely) but I’ve heard some people complain about this in the past so thought it was worth mentioning. The pitch faders have no center detent either which is nice if you’re mixing near 0%, but they do have a small dead zone, during which the center 0% LED is lit.
I pulled off a few of the knobs to see what sort of hardware we’re dealing with: the potentiometer stalks are metal and are nutted to the surface. High quality stuff!
Where the rubber meets the fingers
I like rubber buttons for transport controls, since I’m fond of bashing Cue alot and rubber is more comfortable to me for this activity. Thankfully, the Terminal Mix 4 has rubber Sync, Cue-Play, Cue, and Play/Pause buttons below each wheel. Since the controller is intended for the world market, the buttons are labeled with graphical symbols instead of text, so it’s not immediately obvious what each one does (other than Play/Pause since those symbols are universal.) One funny result of this is that Cue-Play (which jumps to the cue point and plays immediately,) sometimes abbreviated CUP, is denoted with a symbol of a coffee cup on the Terminal Mix 4. (I joke that with Mixxx’s controller scripting, you actually could map that button to an X10 device that turned on your coffee maker, or to page the club staff to bring you another drink.)
At first glance the cross-fader looked short to me, but it’s an optical illusion due to the empty space on either side of it because it is indeed 45mm like the channel faders (and the cross-fader on the SCS.1m.) It’s good and loose which I like, though there doesn’t appear to be a way to adjust it or swap it out easily if you happen to want it stiffer*. The channel faders on the other hand are quite stiff (but smooth,) which is good to prevent them moving accidentally if you brush against them.
Another nicety is that the USB connector is a snug fit and connects with a slight click, helping prevent the cable from accidentally coming loose which could ruin your day.
* While Reloop don’t shout about it, you can fit an Innofader – Ed
In Use
Between the two bundled pieces of software, Virtual DJ LE is much more feature-ful, despite having the LE designator. It offers four decks, more hot cues and samplers (eight of each,) a couple more effects, and it makes use of the cross-fader assign switches (which do nothing in DJ Intro since it only has two decks.) As a result of all of this functionality, the interface feels a bit crowded. Serato DJ Intro has a very elegant and simple interface, but it’s limited to two decks and four samplers. It is also geared specifically toward using a controller in that a number of on-screen items cannot be manipulated with the mouse.
On the plus side, its filter sounds correct for how the knobs are labeled (lpf/hpf) and scratching performance is better with it. So if you’re just getting your feet wet with DJing, I recommend starting with DJ Intro until you get the basics down, then moving to Virtual DJ LE to take full advantage of what the controller offers, provided you don’t do alot of fast scratching. A full list of differences between the two bundled applications is given in the manual which can be found on reloop.com.
That said, you might have some frustration switching between the two because the way they handle the loop controls is noticeably different. I blame this on the odd labeling of the loop buttons*: the left one reads as “Loop halve” when un-shifted and “Loop In” when shifted. The right appears to be “Loop double” un-shifted, and “Loop Out/Disable” when shifted. That seems backwards to me, since as labeled, the buttons will do nothing if a loop isn’t currently set, and good user interface design says to avoid no-op controls in the average/default case. So each provided application took some liberties and mapped the buttons as they saw fit. To make matters worse, Virtual DJ changes the function of the un-shifted buttons depending on whether you’re in a loop or not. Another UI design faux pas, though I can see that it was a compromise to try to match the labeling but avoid the no-op un-shifted button issue. So looping is not intuitive as things stand currently. It’s all spelled out in the button reference in the manual, but it’s still confusing. If Reloop simply moved the white shifted highlight to the top of the two loop buttons (and the software was changed to match,) everything would make sense. I’ve gone ahead and mapped it this way in Mixxx since it’s the most intuitive and familiar.
* Making a controller work with every piece of software be it past, present or future is a real problem in this day and age. Reloop have had to make compromises to get the buttons to make sense but we’re pretty confident that once you start using them with your preferred software, then the labelling won’t matter.
I achieved 4-5ms of latency on my Intel Core i5 M 520 (dual-core HT) 2.4GHz laptop running Windows 7 with the Terminal Mix 4 on a USB 2.0 bus and the provided ASIO driver. Scratching performance on the device is very good, as you might imagine from such large, high-resolution wheels. I found it to be significantly better in Mixxx and DJ Intro than Virtual DJ, as the latter seemed not to take advantage of the higher resolution, especially noticeable during uzis. And since the wheels are at most half as tall (8 mm) as those on many other controllers, there are no issues with accidentally hitting them when going for the nearby sampler buttons.
During my testing, I found that the unit has a built-in soft-takeover feature on the pitch sliders when you change the virtual deck that either side controls using the deck buttons at the bottom. When the Offset light is it, it means the unit will not send pitch events until the slider matches the previous position. It’s nice that they’ve handled this in hardware, but I also found that it can miss if you move the slider too quickly past the target value. Hopefully a future firmware version will tune this up, or at least allow it to be disabled so the software can handle it. (I’m quite familiar with soft-takeover algorithms. They’re a bit tricky to get totally right.)
If you don’t use the pitch fader or mixer controls and the software doesn’t send any LED updates since powering up the unit, it starts doing this Knight Rider-esque scanning light show, presumably to tell you “Hey, I’m still on!” What’s weird is that it doesn’t stop doing this unless you move a mixer control (or the software sends an LED message.) Moving an encoder or jog wheel or pressing buttons doesn’t help. It’s really annoying when you’re trying to use MIDI learn because pressing the shift button has no effect while it’s doing this, so when you think you’re pressing a shifted button, you’re actually mapping the un-shifted version, so you have to remember to move a mixer control every so often to prevent this.
One bad thing I found about the mic and line/phono inputs is that when they’re set to go to the master output, go straight they do: they can’t be previewed in the headphones unless routed to software and it provides the ability. (Neither of the provided applications does.) This is suitable for the intended emergency/panic use case, but it would be nice to be able to smoothly mix in an external source by being able to preview it beforehand without having to involve the software or unplug the headphones. (If you have a need to mix external sources with any regularity, you would be much better served by a combo mixer/controller like the American Audio VMS series.)
The adjustment knobs on the front (for mic, external input and headphone volumes and tone) all retract, preventing any hip-check mishaps.
Though you can adjust the LED brightness setting, the brightest one is still too dim for outdoor gigs like many of us have in the summertime. (Forget about direct sunlight.) It’s significantly worse if you’re off-axis (not standing directly above the unit.) The only buttons that are adequately bright are the white scissors and the red Deck 3 & 4 ones. Plugging in a suitable power supply had no effect on the brightness either. Hopefully Reloop will improve this in a future iteration of the controller.
The quick-reference poster mentions a “Cut’n’Loop performance mode” when the scissor button is activated that I was looking forward to trying out, but it seems it isn’t implemented in either of the provided software packages, nor is it described in the manual. That button just accesses four additional banks of hot cues and samplers in Virtual DJ and does nothing in DJ Intro. I wish I had more information on how that mode was envisioned to operate so I could implement it in Mixxx. I’ll have to contact Reloop and ask.