Instead of arriving in a regular carton box, this controller showed up on my doorstep wrapped in what looked to be a garbage bag. Now, if only they’d make a controller as awesome as the MC-1000 (side note: hit me up, UDG, and we can design something together). Since their soft case bags were quite a success, they expanded their line of products and nowadays offer all kinds of carrying equipment – kind of like the Dutch counterpart to Zomo. UDG decided to change the game and started making much more user-friendly soft cases for vinyl instead. Back then, DJs were primarily relegated to bulky metal cases to transport their vinyl. They did make an awesome bag that came with my EKS Otus – one that I felt was worthwhile enough to mention here. To preface: I know that UDG doesn’t make DJ gear. And when it comes down to it, it’s one of my favorites. The RAW, however, seems to be even harder to find on the used marketplaces around the globe. In 2010, EKS even followed it up with a second edition called the Otus RAW, which featured a physical tempo fader for each deck. Music Radar even goes as far as to refer to the Otus as “The Bruce Lee of DJ controllers” – a major nod to the impression it had on artists who were able to get their hands on it. Interesting, DJ Techtools even did a 40 second reveal of the Otus back in 2008 – talk about some old school DJTT content: This piece of gear was incredibly ahead of its time. It has a trackpad with 2 mouse buttons, so you don’t need to use your laptop’s trackpad. This means that you can use it with a mixer as an additional controller replacing 2 media players, or as an all-in-one controller. One of the coolest features I found is that the Otus is a dual-layer controller, with dual stereo RCA out and a headphone jack. The scratch potential on this is remarkably decent. The Otus comes with a nice, somewhat hefty, but not too heavy 7.5″ platter – which feels remarkably good compared to what I expected. I don’t mind if people bring controllers to gigs, but space tends to be limited – and it’s hard to find space for some piano-sized controllers (yes, I’m looking at you, Numark NS7 III). It aimed not to take up any valuable space inside the DJ booth, which I find to be a great consideration. Its strange profile has a good reason, though: it was built to be placed on top of a turntable platter, and even has a hole on the bottom where the turntable spindle falls into. In 2008, EKS released this alien-looking device (which, I might add, kind of looks like a Headcrab from Half-Life): the Otus. Now, here’s a controller that’s quite unlike anything else you’ve seen. EKS was known for their speakers and amplifiers back in the day, as they had two earlier ventures in the DJ controller market with the XP10 and XP5. However, we can provide a few tidbits of background here. However, one relic remains this Facebook page for the EKS Otus, which refers to itself as an “unofficial legacy site” – it’s worth a browse if you’re intrigued. Their website has gone down, and their social media is dead. Unfortunately, they went under in 2014 (in similar timing with Vestax, we might add), and not much about them remains online. Īny of those sound familiar? I don’t doubt that some of these are obscure – but we’ll tip our hats to them today for creating hardware that has made its mark.ĮKS was a Finnish company that started way back in 1955. Today, we’ll explore four more items from my collection, created by brands I haven’t previously mentioned – and brands that were quite out there: EKS, Stanton DJ, Tonium, and Denon DJ. It seems that you may have enjoyed my last entry on the weird DJ gear out there, so I am back with a few more items that may have been forgotten through the eons of time.
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