Audio Innovate AEM-100 DJ Mixer Review

Audio Innovate AEM-100 DJ Mixer

$399.99

www.audioinnovate.com

With the DJ mixer market more crowded than ever—and with the added impetus on manufacturers to cater to DJs’ increasingly complicated setups, including vinyl, CDs, computers, MIDI controllers and effects boxes—you have to admire Audio Innovate’s gumption. The year-old company, founded by Elliot Marx, leaps into the fray with the AEM-100, a powerful two-channel analog mixer featuring a wealth of DSP options, customizable and ergonomically designed fader-cut buttons, and parallel three-band EQs—in short, over 50 knobs, buttons, faders and geegaws contributing to more creative control over your mix. It’s an impressive proposition, and for the most part an impressive offering.

Ins and Outs

Audio Innovate AEM-100 Inputs and Outputs “Start with plenty of inputs and outputs and especially the ones that come in handy in an emergency,” claims Audio Innovate’s promotional material, and for the most part it does. The AEM-100 comes equipped with twin mic inputs (with separate gain/treble/bass pots and on/off/talk switches for each), and wisely includes a a standard 1/4-inch headphone input and also a 1/8-inch headphone input, for those situations where you’ve lost or broken the adapter on your headphones.

The outputs, however, came up a little short in my case. The mixer features three RCA outs (master, record, and booth) and one pair of unbalanced XLR-but no 1/4-inch phone-plug outs. Not an insurmountable problem, but not the all-inclusive offering an emergency might call for. It would have been nice to have the additional output option, but it’s a minor quibble, especially given the superior sound quality of XLRs. In addition to phonograph/line and line-only RCA inputs, each channel also includes a pair of RCA aux ins; cooler still, the front of the mixer includes two more aux ins, these accommodating 1/8-inch plugs. Finally, two 1/8-inch fader-start outputs allow the AEM-100 to control digital decks. Pretty damned versatile, in short.

True to their name, the engineers at Audio Innovate have kept audio quality a priority, and despite the advanced effects on board, the signal path remains 100-percent analog throughout. The only digitization takes place in the lower half of the mixer, in a digital control circuit that adjusts digital filters according to the analog parameters. The audio signal doesn’t actually pass through these digital signals, keeping the sound clean; additionally, Audio Innovate claims that the digital faders will keep sound from bleeding near the off position when the analog faders begin to wear out, in effect by anticipating the DJ’s desire and damping any unwanted sound.

I do have one complaint about the faders, however: Close to the zero mark, I could swear there’s a noticeable, sudden shut-off in sound, instead of following the slope smoothly all the way down to silence. This is true for both the crossfader and the vertical faders; hopefully, Audio Innovate can correct this in future versions if it tweaks its internal digital faders. (In the meantime, the company told us that "Cleaning the faders with Caig lube [very carefully applied and wiped off] may work if the problem is a dirty fader. Otherwise, the Pro X Fade [more on this below] is set to its lightest setting, so perhaps increasing the tension slightly will stop it from getting knocked around or slightly shifted from speaker vibration.")

One other complaint about sound quality is that certain combinations of various volume knobs (gain is adjustable per channel, on the headphones, and the master) occasionally triggered feedback in the form of a low, grating buzz, and having the headphone gain pushed all the way up reveals a trace of high-pitched line noise. But you shouldn’t be running yourself into the red, in any case, so the former problem should be avoidable. Audio Innovate has added what it calls an "anti-bleed" adapter board to its just-released AEM-100i; the company also offers the board for AEM-100 customers to have installed by a qualified technician.

The layout of the mixer looks confusing at first, but with effect parameters neatly gathered into parallel groups, you quickly get the hang of things; pots are conveniently spaced to allow even ham-fisted DJs to slip their digits in there. My only real complaint is with the three sliders on each channel’s EQ. Tucked closely together, they indeed quickly, almost instantaneously, control multiple permutations of the whole frequency spectrum with a few quick flicks of the wrist. But house and techno DJs preferring to get their freq on in longer, subtler increments may have trouble getting used to the shortness of the faders. If you’re more used to turning knobs, they feel more like kill switches than precision controls.