AMERICAN AUDIO VMS4

There are now so many dif­fer­ent DJ prod­ucts on the mar­ket for inter­fac­ing with com­puter soft­ware, and while many seem to be just an answer to mar­ket demand, some go that extra step and give the users fea­tures they can utilise to improve their per­for­mance. The Amer­i­can Audio VMS4 is one of those prod­ucts. This unit man­ages to give the DJ more options and flex­i­bil­ity than just about any­thing else on the mar­ket. Let’s take a look at what it has to offer.

UNIVERSAL CONTROL

The VMS4 is a DJ con­troller designed to inte­grate with any soft­ware, and in doing so make it pos­si­ble for the user to set it up to their lik­ing. It comes with all the fea­tures you would expect from such a unit; tempo con­trol faders, vol­ume faders, cross-faders, jog wheels and rotary con­trols for gain, as well as high, mid and low EQ. But it also gives you more where other units leave you want­ing. All four chan­nels have their own gain, EQ and vol­ume con­trols, so there is no need to switch between two sets. The front panel gives you all sorts of options, such as cross fader curve adjust­ment and chan­nel assign­ment, head­phone cue, mix and vol­ume con­trols, and also gain and EQ con­trols for the two micro­phone inputs supplied.

NOT JUST A MIDI CONTROLLER

The VMS4 goes one step fur­ther than being just a con­troller for your soft­ware. It is actu­ally an ana­logue mixer with two micro­phone inputs as well as both line and phono inputs for each of the four audio chan­nels. As this is com­bined with the USB inter­face for MIDI con­trol, the VMS4 also acts as an audio inter­face for your com­puter, giv­ing you 16-bit 44.1 kHz audio trans­fer via USB. That means you can use it to record mixes from ana­logue devices, use it to con­trol your DJ soft­ware or, in the unwanted event that your com­puter should crash mid set (which they so often can), it will oper­ate as a tra­di­tional DJ mixer for other audio sources. Not to men­tion you can have two vocal sig­nals run­ning along with your mix from the micro­phone inputs.

MIDI MAD

The VMS4 gives you com­plete con­trol with what­ever soft­ware pack­age you choose to run with it, whether it be the bun­dled Vir­tual DJ LE or any other soft­ware with MIDI learn capa­bil­i­ties. With 62 assign­a­ble MIDI but­tons, four assign­a­ble rotary encoders, 34 assign­a­ble rotary con­trollers and five assign­a­ble lin­ear fader con­trollers, there is not much within your soft­ware that will require you to go to the mouse. And even if you do, there is a mouse touch pad built into the cen­tre of the con­sole. So, plug it in and let the com­puter do the pro­cess­ing. You get to con­trol the VMS4. That’s where the fun begins.

By Rob Gee

Price: RRP $669

Dis­trib­u­tor: LSW Pty Ltd

Phone: (02) 9718 4900

Web­site: www.industrygear.com.au