Tired of Wires (Patreon)

I hate routing audio when a computer is involved. Give me some MIDI cables or a basic mixer and I’ll do fine, but the unpredictability of audio on a PC introduces so many other places for little things to go wrong and it becomes difficult to track everything. It may be boring, but it’s what I’ve been dealing with for a couple of days.

I recently replaced some old DJ gear. My controller was wearing out. The headphone jack was crackly and the faders had begun getting jumpy. When I made the transition from turntables to digital file based DJing I stuck with mid-level controllers. This was partially due to cost, but also because I rarely used the features on the more expensive models. I needed something to simulate the bare minimum of two decks and a mixer and Pioneer DJ’s cheaper controllers fit the bill. I got roughly eight years out of my first one and seven out of the second (before that was an awful controller and before that was turntables). My second Pioneer went through 100+ live streams, thousands of practice hours, and 20+ in-person live sets. I’ll always stand by the DDJ-400 or, as it is now called, the DDJ-FLX4, as the best starter controller. The name changes, but the feature set and price stay roughly the same. When I went to upgrade I wanted to stay with Pioneer DJ, but their pro level entries start to look like less of a value when you compare to other respected brands, like Denon. After a lot of deliberation and penny pinching I chose to go with Denon’s flagship standalone unit. Controllers require a laptop and software. The laptop is an integral part of the equation. As time has gone on the stereotype of the “laptop DJ” has become less negative, but for many people DJing doesn’t feel the same when the computer is involved. A standalone unit basically combines it all together to create something far more similar to what you would find in an actual club. While there is a touch screen to navigate files and display waveforms similar to what you would find in DJ software, the standalone removes the mouse and keyboard which leaves you with one focus: the gear and the music. It makes everything more tactile and makes the DJ feel more involved. In short, it’s simply more fun and feels much closer to the DJing I did in my teens and twenties.

However, bringing it back to the intro, this meant I had to change my streaming set-up. My prior controller and Rekordbox (DJ software) made this really easy in Streamlabs OBS. All I had to do was capture audio from the Rekordbox program and BOOM it would stream the output no problem. The new unit being standalone complicated this. I pulled out my mixer that also acts as a USB audio host and split off the signal to my speakers. Then I captured the mixer as an audio source in Streamlabs. The audio sounded good out of the speakers and SL showed audio coming from the mixer, so I went ahead and did a test stream. Distortion. Awful, crunching distortion. I spent the next 12 hours off and on trying to figure out the issue. Adjusting gains and levels trying to find out where the problem was. The next day I tried adjusting something not expecting a fix, but lo and behold! My test recordings had no distortion! Then, right before I went to stream I hooked it back up and the distortion had returned. In a last ditch effort to figure this out before my brain melted I thought

“Maybe I used a different USB port”

So I changed it and everything was fine again. This USB port works for every other thing I have, but produces distorted audio for one reason or another while the other two ports work fine. Is it a power draw issue? I couldn’t tell you, because none of the damn ports are labelled!

This reminded me of when Pat and I would do the charity marathons. How often things that look correct and are correct on paper fail because of a kinked wire or a faulty port. The worst part of this is that it makes one constantly second guess what they do and don’t know about something. If it isn’t working it’s got to be something we did wrong, right? NO! Faulty parts exist and I’m learning that most of the time when I’ve checked thoroughly and swear what I’ve done is correct it’s time to start checking the components instead of reinventing the wheel.  

-Ian