“It’s a great-sounding all-in-one, it has a layout that’ll be immediately familiar to virtually any working DJ, and it’s ready for action for nearly any DJ.”
As a career marketing guy, I confess to being fascinated by the concept of a “brand” as it relates to selling stuff. And like any other industry, the DJ and pro-audio market is all about “the brand” – creating a name, a look, a feel, a perception – with the intent to form a bond with the market (meaning: you and me), all in the name of (I hate to be so crass here) moving product.
These days, brands are bought and sold like fresh produce, as companies either tire of the space they’re in and try to “refocus” their strategy, and/or some other company senses opportunity and a fast track to get there by simply buying a brand. Money changes hands, customers often end up confused (or annoyed) at the changes, and life somehow goes on when the brand is either driven into the ground, or perhaps elevated to new heights.
Pioneer DJ is one brand that traded hands; roughly a decade ago, Pioneer – the long-established Japanese electronics firm – spun off its DJ division, which was then acquired in 2020 by another Japanese firm, Noritsu, best known for its photography-related products. It was this transaction that was the genesis of the AlphaTheta name. (Importantly, Pioneer DJ’s management, engineers and staff moved to the new company, as well.) Then, earlier this year, the company announced that, while the two brands would co-exist, it would begin migrating away from the Pioneer DJ brand. Pure speculation on my part, but perhaps AlphaTheta had grown tired of paying a licensing fee to use the Pioneer DJ name? Who knows?
In any event, I was given a peek at one of the first core DJ offerings to come from the company that carries the AlphaTheta brand affixed to it: the new XDJ-AZ. It’s been a few years since the company released (under the Pioneer DJ name) the XDJ-XZ, and the common thread is that both products are “all-in-one” (or “standalone,” if you prefer) units with a powerful range of capabilities.
First Impressions
While I liked the predecessor XDJ-XZ, I found it to be a little dated right out of the box. Where I’ve found Pioneer DJ… um, AlphaTheta, historically to be a bit lacking is in the design of its embedded software (or “firmware” if you like) – from both a visual, user-interface standpoint, as well as from a performance standpoint. Frankly, everything else about the XDJ-XZ was as it should be, and reflected the functional design heritage of the Pioneer DJ name. I’d say the same about the XDJ-AZ, except that I applaud AlphaTheta for giving the firmware a good, hard look.
The visuals on the beautiful 10-inch touchscreen of the XDJ-AZ are a vast improvement over the XDJ-XZ model. Better font choices and general aesthetic enhancements, and just more attention paid to the details, has made a real difference. Some aspects still need improvement, and just as I said about the earlier XZ model, the company could learn a thing or two from looking at Apple software products, or even getting intimate with something like Google’s Material Design system. Bottom line: Vastly improved, but there’s work remaining in my view to look and feel like the top-notch product it’s positioned to be.
What it does provide, however, is a truly remarkable amount of configurability. If there’s something about this controller that might benefit from a configuration option, there probably is one in the settings menus. If anything, AlphaTheta might have gone overboard here with the ability to tailor audio, mixer behavior, networking, and so much more. Thankfully, they seem to have chosen appropriate defaults for everything – at least based on the pre-release review unit I had to tinker with.
Beyond that lovely screen and all its configuration options, you get an all-in-one unit that’s about as good as it gets. As with the XDJ-XZ, the XDJ-AZ has a design that builds on the classic Pioneer DJ “two-CDJs-plus-a-mixer” design approach (ostensibly modeled in this case on the CDJ-3000 player and DJM-A9 mixer), and it makes it a very easy transition for DJs accustomed to using Pioneer DJ gear. It has the line’s outstanding classic effects on-board, and everything else about the unit is pure pro-grade.
Take, for instance, the microphone inputs. There are two of them, and neither is short-changed; you get two-in-one connectors (XLR and ¼-inch TRS) for both, and both inputs have mini-mixers that include three-band EQ. (I’m not sure that club DJs would fully appreciate this, but mobile jocks absolutely would embrace the utility of this capability, as I would.)
The massive platters that dominate the top of the XDJ-AZ have the feel of the CDJ-3000. The controls across the unit are smooth and solid, the buttons tactilely just right. In fact, everything about it reads “quality,” just as I’d expect.
It is, however, a beast. It weighs nearly 30 pounds, consumes 3 feet of space side-to-side, almost 2 feet front-to-back, and peaks at nearly 6 inches in height off the desktop. (In fairness, the XDJ-AZ and the previous XDJ-XZ are roughly the same weight and size.) This is not the sort of unit that’s going to get carted around in a ballistic nylon backpack from gig to gig. But then, at its price point and with its capabilities, that’s not the sort of DJ it’s designed for, to begin with.
In Use
These days, I keep my core DJ-music collection on a single, high-speed, high-capacity USB thumb drive. The XDJ-AZ provides a pair of USB ports on the top surface, each one supplying a full 1 amp of power to plugged-in devices. My first step was to stick the drive into the unit without any preparation. As expected, the unit really wants you to use rekordbox to pre-process your music collection. Offboard pre-processing is the same expectation that the company’s primary competition in this space has, but it’s not strictly a requirement here; I could load tracks and use them without the pre-processing.
However, where AlphaTheta has made some different choices from its competition is that the onboard music processing will analyze the BPM, but it’s also noticeably sluggish to get the job done, and when it finally finishes, it will not identify the song key for harmonic mixing. I’m of the belief that all the capabilities of the unit should be available directly on the device; we’re well beyond the point where either the power or availability of microprocessors, DSPs, and other discrete components can be used as an excuse to depend on pre-processing being done off-device ahead of time. I noted this shortcoming in my review of the XDJ-XZ, and four years down the road, I’m surprised that AlphaTheta has chosen to force users to resort to rekordbox to get the most out of the unit.
[According to AlphaTheta: “The AZ integrates with rekordbox wirelessly, either with Link Export Mode within a network, or with CloudDirectPlay. The unit is designed to help users get the most out of using the rekordbox ecosystem, which a user can take to multiple devices, not just a single one.”]
Like other offerings on the market, the XDJ-AZ has integrated connectivity, including WiFi. This enables playback of material from a rekordbox CloudDirectPlay collection, as well as Beatport Streaming – subscription required, of course. (For firmware updates, the device must be powered into “firmware update mode.”) The XDJ-AZ also allows for playback of material from a computer if you’d like, and if you are a Serato DJ user, the XDJ-AZ can be used as a controller for that as well (admittedly, not something I tested).
Bottom line? No matter how you need to access your music, the unit very likely has a way to let you use it during a performance. It may be worth mentioning that some competitors have enabled Tidal streaming support in their gear; this or the equivalent would be a welcome addition to the XDJ-AZ, especially for mobile jocks where EDM is not a primary genre.
One cool feature is that the XDJ-AZ provides support for wireless monitoring via the company’s proprietary SonicLink technology. Designed to be an improvement over Bluetooth, it’s supposedly as much as 20-times faster, providing a much lower latency listening experience. (It’s worth noting that the unit does not provide SonicLink connectivity for AlphaTheta’s SonicLink-enabled wireless DJ speakers.)
To test the headphone SonicLink functionality, the company loaned a pair of their also-new HDJ-F10-TX wireless DJ headphones. Bottom line? I was impressed by the both the audio quality and the performance, and I loved not fighting a curly cord at every turn – so I see the benefit. The HDJ-F10-TX headphones themselves, on the other hand? Not sure I’m a fan; the clamping pressure is outrageously strong, and I found them uncomfortable to use for very long.
Finally, I think it’s worth pointing out the incredible effects capabilities of the XDJ-AZ. The unit’s “color” effects are tied to a knob, one per channel; while it offers a handful of options, perhaps the most useful is the filter, allowing easy access to high- or low-pass filters, which can be extremely useful in certain mixing situations. The “beat” effects correlate to a more typical effects engine that one might expect. In short, they’re amazing; the Mobius effect, in particular, makes it incredibly easy to add energy to a performance, or to cover for mixes that might be harmonically compatible, but have other characteristics that make them challenging. But there are many other useful effects to choose from here.
Conclusions
Without question, the AlphaTheta XDJ-AZ ($3,199 list) is nice improvement to its Pioneer DJ XDJ-XZ predecessor. The company has upgraded the screen, improved the firmware, and introduced numerous other useful enhancements that I’d say reinforce the company’s position as one of the most important, most interesting, and most relevant brands in the DJ space. It’s a great-sounding all-in-one, it has a layout that’ll be immediately familiar to virtually any working DJ, and it’s ready for action for nearly any DJ. Just don’t expect to stuff one in your backpack.