One of the hottest stories in the last 12 months has been the release of Panasonic’s Technics SL-1200GR, the still too expensive but slightly more affordable version of the off thechart expensive 1200G and 1200GAE. Our stance from the start of this, backed up by Panasonic’s own PR, media statements, and Technics audiophile brand positioning has been that the new turntables have not been made for DJs.
That doesn’t mean that DJs can’t use them of course, but with a marketplace full of viable alternatives and also second hand OG technics, it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense for DJs to drop so much coin on the new ones.
But still, some were convinced that the DJ world had seen saved, and that the Technics SL-1200GR was the second coming — but we didn’t believe that from the start. However, it’s well and good saying it, but it took one of our kind i.e. DJ gear reviewers to roll up his sleeves (wait… he only wears t-shirts, lots and lots of t-shirts) and actually prove it. Thus DJ City’s Mojaxx set about getting a 1200GR in for review, a task that proved to be harder than he imagined.
Following proven official channels into Panasonic, Mojaxx got precisely nowhere quickly. He met a brick wall similar to the one that we hit when we wanted to get the SL-DZ1200 media player in all those years ago, albeit without reps actually running away from us at trade shows. So he shook his grapevine and found a friendly retailer in the shape of Westend DJ who provided Mojaxx with a unit upon which he carried out his usual level of in front of camera magic.
It’s absolutely worth watching the lowdown from Mojaxx. But the basic takeaway is that while the new SL-1200GR is worthy in so many ways, the squidgy feet make the 1200GR unsuitable for DJing because of their audiophile friendly design. And the price really does make them too expensive given the sheer volume of new and used turntables in the market place.
Bar the squidgy feet issue, Mojaxx pretty much confirms what we and everyone else has said all along. So if you have big pockets, you can indeed grab yourself a pair of new 1200GRs (£2600), but also get yourself some original Technics feet (£294 for a set of eight) for them to make them usable for spinning, which does rather defeat the object of spending all that money in the first place. For £3K however, you can get a full high quality DJ turntable/mixer setup.
So big thanks to Mojaxx for taking one for team DJWORX, and to Westend DJ for making it happen.