Korg Kaoss Mixer
by Chris Hafner | Published March 2008 | In the Mix Archives

For gearheads, this is enough to make you cry. Korg has come up with a combination next-generation KAOSS pad and DJ mixer and combined them into one product, beautiful in its simplicity and design.

The KAOSS Mixer combines the pad's hands-on management of effects processing with a high quality 2-channel mixer. The former gives this an analog feel quite unlike most products on the market today. This is absolutely essential for ground-breaking live performance. With this product, Korg takes a glance at modern digital DJ gear and manages to move it from the laptop and back into the DJ's hands.

It's also a fully-featured mixer, featuring line and phono inputs. Full integration is possible with many devices, from CD players to turntables and straight-up musical instruments and microphones. Each of the 3 channels include source selection, EQ and trim control with peak indicator for on-the-fly use. I'm skeptical of Korg's "Ultra Boost technology", which claims to be capable of adding low end sound without speaker distortion.

I've tested this and haven't found the "crystal clear" claim to be true. More useful are more than 80 effect presets and an auto-BPM function that compares signals. It's fairly accurate as far as beat-matching aids go, though I sometimes wonder how many will disdain using them.