Ask most people about DJ turntables and most regular folk will mention Technics' at some point, however Stanton has actually been in the audio equipment business since the 1940s and they have had massive success especially with their DJ focused items. They entered the CD turntable market a few years ago and now, after the C314 which came out in 2006 with fairly mixed reviews Stanton has gone and released the new Stanton C.324 CD turntable.
Design
The Stanton C.324 is a fairly heavy piece of kit, but
this is very common with most of this type of equipment, most DJs don't want
equipment that feels like it could easily get knocked of the workstation. The c324 feels beefy, it looks like it has a metal casing, but in actuality it's a very dense plastic. The top of the machine is a dull metallic shine like well polished aluminium and the LED buttons with the dark counter top will blend in nicely with most pro equipment sets which tend to be dark coloured. Of course I'm sure you know this, the picture is right there, but it's so pretty when you actually handle it in real life that it just had to be said.
Features & Effects
The Stanton c.324 CD player holds a couple of interesting features that should be an industry standard. For one, the use of the internal memory is a very simple idea, that I'm surprised hasn't been done many times before. If you play a song you can save a bunch of quick loop samples into your internal memory banks. You get about 3 banks of memory in each deck and you can save up to about a minute's worth of music (in each deck) giving you a good 2 minutes of samples to loop through while you switch CDs or fade and beat-match your way into the next tune. It's especially useful since you also have the option to take out your disc while the samples play, the deck keeps the stuff in the ram until you delete the cue points or you turn your system off.
The decks also allow multiple effect stacking which means
you can combine your echo, your flanger and you reverb to create some crazy
effect. You also have A creative DJ could do some awesome things with these 2
features alone and I expect to see some cool C.324 YouTube videos in a few
months.
You may have seen some videos online of the Stanton c.324 in action and well, even in this day and age, there are still a lot DJs out there that might still believe that CD Turntables aren't up to par yet, so you probably want to know just how good the plate is, will it sound right, will it feel right etc.
The bad news is if you're used to vinyl or big plates and you're a scratcher you'll have to get used to the small ones in this piece of kit. The scratches sound good and there aren't any audible clicks or delays in the response time when you switch quickly, however, I'm not sure if it's just me or if it's the decks themselves, but that's probably more my fault for staying too long and getting too comfortable with the same kit.
The good news is the Stanton C.324 will do pretty much everything you'd expect any good turntable to do and then some. In fact one of the best bits about the C324 is the amount of features it has packed under its hood. It has a couple of very unique features on it that you won't find in most turntables and at it's price range it's surprisingly capable.
Stanton C.324 Techncal Specs
- Abletop CD Player with Touch Sensitive
Jog Wheel for Scratching and Beat Juggling
- CD Slot Drive Mechanism
- MP3 Playback with Text Display and
Onboard File and Folder Browsing
- Onboard Pattern and Real-Time Sequencer
for on-the-fly Drum Machine Style Performances
- 7 High-Quality Beat Synchronized Digital
Effects: Filter, Auto Filter, Echo, Phaser, Flanger, Transform, Pan
- Beat Synchronized Sampling and Looping
With Four Trigger Pads and Cue Memory
- Auto and Manual BPM Control
- Vinyl Emulation with Adjustable Platter
Start / Brake Speed
- Adjustable Pitch (+/- 8%, 16%, 25%, 100%)
with Pitch Bend
- Key Lock Allows a Song's Tempo To Be
Changed Without Affecting the Original Key of the Song
- Reliable Anti-Shock Playback with Auto
Cue
- Blue LCD Display with Visual Marker for
- S/PDIF Digital Output
Shop
