Reply to One hot night with the VCI-400 EGE quick review!! (Previous S4 owner)

First off the unit is solid, knobs and faders feel very nice but the encoders fill a bit plastic.
Line faders feel better than the S4, a bit stiffer.

Player buttons are rubbery which are nice but the other pad buttons are plastic. Not a big deal but would have been nice to have them all the same feel.

Funny thing is most things feel very good and sturdy but then some knobs (jog wheel touch adjustment knobs, encoder knobs, cue/mix and headphone volume knobs) feel very cheap and plastic. Would have been nice to have the same feel for all the knobs.

Jog wheels take a bit of time to get use to but they do have lots of adjustment and can be tweaked to your liking. Scratching improved with some midi map setting tweaks but not as tight as the S4. (not a big deal as I don’t scratch.)

Also a back spin is possible with these where the S4 you can’t.

Ok so a lot of good stuff here until I tried to beat mix by ear, here’s where I found my biggest issue:

Tempo faders are not as fine as the S4!!! This is annoying!!! I tried all sorts of adjustments with the midi mapping but it looks like the hardware is what the problem is. Basically if I set the S4 tempo faders to 8% I can get really fine increments for adjustments, I’m talking .01% or so!!! I was able to adjust BPM by .01 depending on the BPM of the tracks getting mixed. Best I can get with the 400 is .1%. For nice long house transitions this is a pain to always adjust with the jog wheel.

I kept on playing with the settings and did manage to fine tune to .01 but that only gave me a maximum tempo adjustment of +/- 1%!!! Not cool.

What I then did was to use the loop jump/loop fine move encoder for fine tempo adjustment. This works and is actually more precise to use instead of a fader but it’s annoying to now have to use a fader and encoder to beat match.

Maybe we can upgrade these faders to one with more increments?

Another issue I have with the faders is the center position. Once the fader is in the center the red led lights up!! Nice!!! But to move it from center and make an adjustment you have to move it off this led switch section. So basically there is dead adjustment space in the center of the fader. Good to get the fader easily in the center but bad if you want to make very fine adjustments close to the center unless you watch for the led to turn off.

Anyone feeling this pain?

I will be posting more soon.

***Update: here are some vids I posted on Youtube.