I’ve been staring at the iDJ2, and noticed there’s no nudge controls… you know, the thing that lets you simulate a spindle-twist or a finger on the platter to momentarily speed up or slow down a track that you’re beatmatching to another track… these are absolutely critical tools to beat matching… in fact, this is a deal-killer for me. So shocked was I to discover this painfully obvious omission, I emailed numark… here’s the reply I got:

Hi Steve,
I do not believe there will be a nudge feature on these though these are still in the early stages of development. I can put this in as a feature request to the engineers to see if this can be implemented.

Sincerely,
Someone at Numark

Oof. To come within 99% of solving all of the criticisms of the original iDJ, and then fall on your face for the last 1%… that’s a shame. I hope someone there has enough political clout to push for one more version of this deck… without nudge, you can have scratch and pitch control, it’s pointless… ok, maybe not completely pointless, but it’s just not going to be taken seriously by people who do know how to beatmatch, and the extra features will probably go unused by people who don’t know how to beatmatch.

For me it comes down to this: No nudge? No sale.

update 2006-09-21

Rob V says:

As one of the designers of IDJ2 I’d like to point out, as others have mentioned, that the nudge (momentary pitch shift) feature is implemented on the jog wheels. This is the same as many Numark (and other) CD decks and, for my money, is more useful than a button implementation. The wheels can also be switched into search (fast seek through track) and scratch modes (four variants).