WHAT’S IT LIKE TO MIX ON DJ GEAR FROM 20 YEARS AGO?

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Some advice: if you’re in the market for very old DJ equipment, always ask the seller to first show you it works.

Towards the end of last year, I drove to the south coast of England to collect a flight case containing a pair of Pioneer CDJ-100S and a DJM-300-S mixer, an entry-level DJ setup from around two decades ago. By this point I’d given up trying to find the actual first mixer I owned, a Gemini BPM 250 I got back in 2000. The setup I was buying seemed like a good approximation. Like the old Gemini mixer, the DJM-300-S has BPM counters, and I planned to use it with the first turntable I owned, a Citronic PD-1, which I’d just found in the attic. In any case, this would be easier than someone at Pioneer DJ in Japan digging up this ancient equipment and sending it to the UK. That was the theory, anyway.

The seller seemed trustworthy. He worked at a local school, and the gear had apparently been sitting in storage for a couple decades, purchased but basically never used. I don’t need to check it works, I thought, it still smells new. So convinced was I of the gear’s quality that I didn’t check it was working until a couple weeks later, when I actually needed to use it…