Source: The Verge
Lead: You’ll soon be able to scratch that DJing itch without an expensive or temperamental needle.
DJing was once derided by fans who couldn’t see the attraction in people playing other people’s music. But since the dawn of disco and through the ascendancy of Hip-Hop, House, Techno, and whatever the latest and greatest forward thinking minimal music genre will be, DJs have become the kings and queens of the party. Everybody wants to be a DJ.
Being a DJ used to mean carting round boxes of records with you everywhere. Then things went digital, which meant a USB pen and a pair of headphones was enough unless you wanted to scratch that is, which requires the record player needle to feel the musical grooves of the record and be dragged back and forth across them. There was a technical solution for that, however, with timecode vinyl allowing the needles to pick up how long a record had been playing and then transmit the data to a laptop that would blast out the music at the corresponding moment.
Needles can be expensive and temperamental, raising problems for DJs. Problems that a brand new device aims to solve. The Phase, which will cost around $300, is a pair of sensors that are placed on the turntables. The sensors send information about their movements to a receiver that then works similarly to the software playing timecode vinyl. With early demos showing no lag and impressive responses, even to complicated movements, The Phase could be about to make scratch DJing cheaper, and easier while also addressing some key industry issues for pro DJs.
