Thanks for checking out this Pioneer DJM-2000 Nexus review. The market of professional DJ equipment was for a long stretch of years dominated by Pioneer.
Between the mid 90’s and mid 00’s Pioneer provided most of the CDJs and DJMs prevalent in clubs and with many young touring DJs. Later, the CDs were gradually replaced by hard drives.
With this emergence, Traktors and Seratos ironed out the early issues that had threatened their existence to become the preferred choice of many DJs. It would be difficult to find many DJs who still exclusively use CD’s past 2010.
Eventually, the top executives of Pioneer had to adjust to this change and released their first DJing units, the CDJ-900 and CDJ-2000.
Both units offer support for MIDI and HID via USB which are the primary forms of digital apps. Further, this new crop of CDJ’s offers support to share one primary source of music via Pro DJ Link which is a proprietary protocol running on Ethernet.
The DJM-2000 is Pioneer’s way of keeping up with this momentum and Pioneer have made a bold claim that this is the most powerful mixing tool and FX processor ever to grace any club.
When you take out the DJM-2000 out of its box, you will immediately notice its size. It is about five inches wider than its predecessor, the DJM-600. The extra size is accounted for by the center section which is shared by the DJM’s calling card and a beat effect section.
The calling card is a 5.8” high touchscreen located at the bottom while the beat effect section closely resembles the EFX 1000.
Two channels of mixing controls surround the middle section each side; the extra bits are pushed to each edge.
There are six Ethernet jacks at the back which are more than the average home network routers. The Ethernet jacks can support up to two laptops and four Pro-Link supporting DJs.
Each of the four channel strips has a standard 3-band EQ ranging from -26 Db to +6. However, the behavior of all the EQ’s can be switched to match those of the DJM 1000 Isolators.
Just below the equalizers, there is a knob labeled FILTER which functions to control the amount of Instant Instrument effect chosen for a particular track. There are six types of effects which are labeled as INST FX on the mixer.
These filters include jet, crush, noise, zip, Hi-Pass Filter (HPF) and Low-Pass Filter (LPF). Of the six, the filters are the most important though the other four provide some interesting color to tracks when used effectively.
As earlier mentioned, the controls and beat effects are almost entirely adapted from the EFX-1000.
The DJM changes a few things such as having a 3band EQ for the beat effects and also adding a few new features which are exclusive to the DJM-2000. These are reverb, multitap delay, and gate and slip roll. The slip roll is the most interesting since unlike the regular roll which endlessly repeats a certain amount of a track, the slip roll resamples the sample loop each time it’s pressed.
Essential Gear EVERY DJ Needs!
Last update on 2024-09-06 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API
One of the most talked about features of the DJM 2000 is the touchscreen mixer.
Previous users of Pioneer will recall that the SVM-1000 has had the same touch control since 2007. The screen looks sturdy enough and hopefully will not suffer the same fate as the Kaoss pad screens and Numark mixers whose production was discontinued due to cracking of the screen.
The touch screen is responsive to a two-finger touch and allows switching between four modes of operation: sidechain remix, live sampler control, frequency mix and MIDI control mode.
The Frequency Mix, which is the most useful of the four modes, gives you control over seven frequency bands on each of two selectable channels.
This ingenious design allows for precise mixing control.
The touchscreen’s usefulness is undone by the other modes. For instance, whereas Sidechain remix is a good concept, eventually its effectiveness is reduced by the limited range of sounds you can achieve.
The other touchscreen mode is the MIDI control which is more like the monochrome Lemur, albeit a smaller one. The MIDI controls come in four different page types. The significant difference between the lemur and the MIDI control is that you cannot change the page layout of the MIDI controls.
Besides, all the messages that the MIDI sends are hard coded meaning anything you want to control with them has to support MIDI learn.
At the back of the unit is a 5-pin standard MIDI out jacks which give MIDI clock output. This is derived from tap tempo or auto BPM detection. The undoing of the auto BPM mode is that it is not accurate enough when synchronizing anything. It tends to have a major drift even when playing kick-heavy tracks.
The live sampler has the core problem of the DJM-2000 that may make many non-Pioneer people go with other alternatives.
In its most basic form, the live sampler requires that you own a CDJ-2000 or CDJ-900. Otherwise having the live sampler is useless. It will only allow you to record loops to a laptop that runs the music software provided by Pioneer’s rekordbox organization.
While this is not much of a big deal, you end up realizing that you may pay too much for features that you may not be able to use at all.
The DJM-2000 is a 21st century DJ mixer, especially with the Pro-Link router features making it a great Pioneer hub.
Other features that the DJM-2000 offers such as the “now on play” CDJ backlighting control are quite impressive.
If you have already invested in the new generation CDJs (about two to four grand), then the DJM 2000 will suit you well.
However, for someone looking for a standalone mixer or a control surface for their DJ system, it was difficult to recommend the DJM 2000 owing to its $2500 price tag. Despite the one of a kind frequency mix mode of the touch screen and the complement of effect combinations, the other DJM-2000’s features are not worth the price.
Go Back to the Main Best DJ Mixers Page