It’s that time of the year that DJs love – NAMM is here, and with it, all sorts of announcements and unveilings about incredible new DJ toys to play with.

For a long time, the Pioneer DJM S9 has been the dominant scratch mixer in the market, but it wasn’t always this way – the Rane TTM57sl is a legendary piece of kit, the first mixer to include a Serato soundcard inside the mixer, and possessed a stunning fader, fantastic sounding EQs, and it was built like a tank. Their follow up mixers have been good, but never quite caught on in the same way, the DJing community seeming to prefer the DJM S9 layout and functionality.

The Rane Seventy Two went heavily in that direction, but now with the Seventy it looks like a direct challenge, and a strong one too! The EQ section has been shuffled around, they’ve cleared the clutter from around the FX paddles, and the headphone cueing is closer to the S9 style now.

The 3 faders are all brand new contactless MAG FOUR faders, with a tension adjust control for the crossfader.

For more info on the features, check out their video here

Having played on a Seventy Two quite a bit, a lot of my issues with that mixer seem to have been addressed here, and it seems that they have stayed true to their commitment to heavy duty build quality. They’ve to have adopted most of the workflow features that make people love the S9 – but it’s 2020, and you would hope that audio and build quality will have moved forward since that came out in August 2015. Rane EQs have always sounded phenomenal, and they have a well-earned reputation for making genuinely professional kit that is built to last. If you are faced with a choice between a 5 year old piece of technology, or a brand new one, you’d guess that the new one will be King – time will tell if that is the case, or indeed if Pioneer have a new mixer to reply with!

DJ Craze put together this fantastic routine for the launch, kicking off with a problem I think most DJs can relate to…