Customer Reviews

M-Audio Torq Xponent Advanced DJ Performance/Production System

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

So after scouring the internet for reviews of the xponent, and having used its cousin the Torq Mixlab and getting down the basics of CPU based DJing, I am proud to say that I couldn't be happier with the Xponent. I got it a few weeks ago, have a Macbook that runs great with it, and have so far had no problems whatsoever. The software is fast and loads my itunes library (over 16k songs) in about 30 seconds. One of the best features of the Torq software is how it figures out (or you can override) the beat of each song and SAVES it. This means that when you're spinning, you can sort by BPM and see the 20 songs that are close in BPM that you have used before. This makes song selection a pleasure!

All the switches and knobs are very responsive, and as a person who basically started DJing (beatmatching, mixing, cueing) a month ago, I feel right at home here. The loop features are easy to use and drop in, and the sampler is very powerful and easy to use. I just spun a big house party with this thing a week ago and it went great! The effects are fun, and using the mouse pad like a Chaos Pad allows for some cool remixing on the fly. I find that scratching is easy to do and there are various settings to determine how sensitive the wheels are.

All in all, this is a great product for a novice or someone who likes to pick music and wants to get into real mixing. If you're the person always holding the iPod at the party but want more control, this is definitely a great place to start (and as far as I'm concerned, finish). As for all the haters of digital DJing, I don't really care, its much easier than bringing vinyl and remembering BPMs and you can plug in someone at the party's ipod and use their music in real time. I find that the Xponent is extremely versatile, perfect for a beginner or seasoned DJ alike, and it and its grandchildren will be leading us into the future of DJing. Hope this helps, there is a lack of people talking about the Xponent and its a truly great device that has allowed me to finally do something I've wanted to do for years, but I've never had the resources to get set up with vinyl and dj lessons.

Cheers!

-DP

This is by far the most affordable quality way to make DJ mixes. All you need is a computer, some headphones, some speakers, your music, and blam. It is very user-friendly and whether you're used to vinyl or not, you should easily be able to get the hang of this little powerhouse. I was reared on vinyl for seven years, and so I was naturally very skeptical at first. Alas, I was pleasantly surprised. From the perspective of one who is very used to and in love with vinyl, here are the downsides to the xponent:

1. I'm not aware of any unit like it that can fix this problem, but the side of the wheels obviously makes for a much more sensitive (and potentially fatal) medium. You can't always be 100% what touching a wheel will do (e.g. will it slow it down, or will it stop it!).

2. The faders and the wheels don't feel very solid, although they are. They have a plasticy, toyish feel to them, unlike a nice DJ mixer. Of course, a decent DJ mixer will cost you about the same price you would pay for this unit, so I'm sure it kind of evens itself out. Don't let this sway you too much--as I said, they feel flimsy, but they're solid.

3. When you change the speed of the song, you don't change the pitch. This can be a plus or minus. On the plus side, it isn't as obvious when you have to do some tweaking. On the minus side, sometimes the pitch change that you inevitably get with vinyl contributes to the mix. Then again, I suppose no pitch change could also conceivably work to your advantage in this way. What this means for sure is that mixes that work on vinyl won't necessarily work on the xponent.

4. The computer interface gives you a BPM count. Now many people will like this--particularly DJs who suck--but IT IS A CRUTCH, and will make you very lazy. Even if you don't intend to, you wind up peeking nevertheless all the time, and this will quickly diminish your ability to mix by ear--and the ear is the most important part of a DJ. I know some of you are thinking, "Yeah, but can't you defeat that feature?" Well, of course, yes, but you still need the visual audio readout of each track to see what it's doing, and lining it up visually can be just as much of a crutch. I'm not sure of how to remedy this.

5. Scratching is really difficult and awkward. If you're going to make scratching one of your centerpieces, please use vinyl.

6. Dropping beats while cued in is also very difficult on this unit.

Hope this helps!

I have had one of these for about a year now, and I really love it, except for 2 things.

1. no mic input that kinda sucks replace the pedal port on the back with a mic in and that would make this thing 100x better.

2. Torq sucks, bad.

I have since mapped the xponent into Traktor and it makes a great midi control surface for that software and Traktor not only analyses the files 100x more accurately its more stable and easier to use.

Before Xponent, I was using Torq with Akai MDP24 (a midi controller with 16 pads, 6 sliders, 8 knobs, similar to Trigger Finger). While it worked fine, I couldn't wait to get Xponent that's perfectly midi-mapped for Torq that has jog wheels. Now, I finally got one and here are my thoughts on this product.
My immediate impression of Xponent was that it was built better than I had expected. Having played with the X-Session Pro (usb/midi mixer)which felt cheap and slightly flimsy, Xponent felt more solid. The sliders are very lose and smooth and didn't feel like they'll break anytime soon. The rubberized buttons feel good, too. The jog wheels spin very smoothly. Although, I hear from some that the right wheel gets a lot stiffer after some time. The Xponent is not bus-powered. It comes and must be used with an external power supply. Overall, the built definitely met, if not, exceeded my expectations from an M-Audio product.
On the performance side of things, I believe the product is still buggy. My PC is 8 months old (dual-core/2MB RAM) running on Windows XP. Even with the latest Torq software and latest Xponent driver here are the issues I get:
1. Time to time, Torq fails to run, indicating that I need to attach the hardware. I would have to uninstall/reinstall the driver occasionally.
2. I also ran into this issue once: After I installed the driver, Audio output and Cue output option (for audio channel output) in Torq disappeared. After reinstalling the software yet again, the options appeared as they should be.

I can deal with the driver issues because once it works, it'll continue to work, at least until the next reboot.

Now the biggest issue I have is this:
1. After a while, I hear some distorted noise in the sound output. This is really bad because you can't have that during a gig. I read through all kinds of forums and found a temporary solution around this issue. Depending on your PC, play around with increasing/decreasing the latency, the ASIO buffer size, and sample rate. If the sound goes bad again, I learned that at least I don't have to quit and relaunch the software. I can reselect the buffer size in the option menu in Torq. I know for a fact that the problem isn't from an overloaded PC as some might think. PC performance is not at peak (ran windows task manager). Also, I've been using Torq with Conectiv and I've NEVER ran into sound issues.
The good thing is that at least Xponent works most of the time. I am giving it 4 stars because, in my opinion, it's still too buggy to be perfect.

The more I use the Xponent/Torq setup, the more I love it. Its very responsive, laid out well and is probably one of the best alternatives for those not wanting to get into CDJs. It feels more natural than laptop DJ control surface setups if you are a DJ coming from CD player or even vinyl decks. Its easy to setup, customize and organize your playlists - It even reads iTunes playlists. The built in effects are good utility effects but you also have the ability to run any VST plugin effexts you may have.

There are a couple things that I was a bit disappointed about but are not deal breakers. There is no ability to do 88.2khz audio output as of yet. Also while I like that the crossfader is silky smooth, the pitch and volume faders are also light and smooth. This means its very easy to bump them and maybe knock a track out of sync or accidentally slam or drop the volume of a track. With a little bit of time and familiarity though you learn to dance a bit more carefully around these controls.

All in all a great dj setup that is able to compete for a relatively low price.

Just picked this up at my local Guitar Center last week. Came with Torq 2.0 and I even got a free gig bag (a pretty nice one at that, I think it's around 60-70 bucks separately) for registering on the M-Audio/Avid site. Anyway, I haven't had any problems with Torq 2.0 that a lot of people have been having recently, even though I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion (obviously from that you can deduce I use a Mac). I just made sure to install with only my wireless enabled, because that's typically all I use in terms of networking (Torq 2.0's license system is based on your network card configuration, so it will only run if I have my wifi enabled, a weird mechanism, I know, but I haven't had any trouble. All that's required is on startup that you have the same configuration that was in place while installing, once started you can do anything you want with your NIC's) The software was nice and relatively easy to learn (though it has depth to it), and things have been going smoothly this first week (I'm a novice dj, my only prior experience is messing around in a mac program called djay without a controller, which the xponent works out-of-the-box with) The unit, while made out of plastic, feels very substantial and is well built. Like I saw in another review, the faders seem quite fragile and plasticy but I've noticed they are quite sturdy. The buttons and knobs have a nice feel to them and the lighting on this unit is awesome (you can make the lights pulsate to the beat in Torq, which is pretty much just eye candy but I dig it if only for the novelty). There are ample controls for effects, of which Torq has plenty and even supports vsti effects (of which I have a lot of from producting over the years). The trackpad is something I have not seen on any other controller, and it is novel in that you can use it as a mouse (handy) or as a midi controller (for productions or controlling effects). The jogwheels are solid as well but I don't plan on doing too much scratching as I'm primarily inclined to dj dance music and, to be frank, if you're gonna be serious about scratching you're gonna use vinyl or, if any controller, maybe a Numark NS7. All-in-all, I've enjoyed this controller very much thus far and look forward to hone my skills (especially beatmatching/gridding, autosync can only take you so far) over the summer so I can dj some parties once I return to college in the fall. ;)

I read the reviews,good and bad and decided to try it any way.Im running a newer version 13"macbook pro,8gig ram.
Right out of the box, nothing but trouble with getting the play buttons to work on the exponent, they would work in torq, but not on the unit. Then i updated to the newest version and it worked, then crashed and started reprogramming it self. The pitch knob would all of the sudden become the play button and everything would switch around.To stop it you reset the midi default.I figured that out and managed to use it with all sorts of glitches and crappy sound quality for about a month.Then the left channel all of the sudden is like 40dbs quieter for some reason and also stopped saving my itunes playlist's order for some reason.It's built like crap, sounds like junk, works sometimes.If you want a stable platform for djing, this is NOT the machine.Im selling this piece and kicking my self for buying it.

I used to spin dnb on vinyl a few years back until I broke my hand... This unit had just come out and was in my golden box on sale on Amazon for a decent price (and I had amassed 30 gigs of dnb tracks) so I gave it a go.
I was a bit hesitant at first because of the fact that it seemed a little too light in construction - as in, I would break it if I got too excited.

NO SUCH PROBLEM AT ALL. I have been getting better and better every day on this - the unit, while having very smooth slides on it (sensitivity can be increased or decreased in software so every little accidental nudge won't throw things out of sync or cut over to the un-queued track). I also learned to make sure my sleeves are pushed up... duh.

I was starting to run into some issues where the sets I was recording would loop several times at second 21 of the first track but setting a higher buffer level made it non-existent. I also had some problems with some strange behaviors on the VST racks - I found that it was just disorganization on my part and I just reset the software back to default... All is GREAT.

The software is great in every way - it is great for searching through my itunes playlists (where I actually line up my tracks for my sets before I record). It loads up all of my music in under 30 seconds - it has a great analysis engine for finding the BPM of a track - that you can easily override by tap-control, just like a CDJ unit... the torq software also appends the BPM to the metadata of the track so it is ALWAYS there. (AWESOME)
The elastic pitch control where you can change BPM without the pitch is also VERY handy.

I am now also mapping the Xponent to Traktor Pro, just for giggles - it works GREAT! And, actually, I think that Torq has more functionality than Traktor Pro...

Very worth it and I look forward to the next releases from Avid/M-Audio...

OH - and I have seen people complain about the customer service - I have contacted them (because I was having some issues where certain controls just stopped responding - it only required a reboot of Torq in the end) and the customer service people were completely professional and helpful.

So what style of music is everyone else on here spinning?

You can mix and scratch just like vinyl. I only wish M-Audio added a mic input. Other than that, if you want to mix without the bulk and $$$$'s of 1200's and a mixer, this a great way to go. Be sure to update the software to v 1.5. I have used this thing at events with 300 plus people with no problems.

This thing is so powerful it will blow your mind, looping, sampling, phaser, flanger, repeat, distortion, reverb, dual filter, strobe and those are just the options for the 4 buttons and knobs under each turntable. Theres also cross-fading, sampling, syncing and a bunch of other functions most of which i cant even remember, the best function tho is that all the buttons are reassignable. All that being said mine is a bit glitchy, one of the volume controls adjusts itself to about half if i put slide the slider all the way to the top, and one of the buttons that I assigned to a sample keeps going off without me touching it. My friend also has the same mixer and his is having a few issues, but these are minor inconveniences at best that personally can be fixed by doing some smart adjustments (i keep the volume slider at half instead of full and if i need to turn it up i can use the slider most of the way or just use the volume dials beside the kill switches. One of the amazing things about this thing that I really like is the record function which records what you are sending out through the master (oh ya there are 2 audio outputs one for your headphones and one for everyone else to hear) which means you can record your own remixes and they are saved automatically as wave files...my only problem is that i cant find a wave to mp3 converter so that i can resample the remixes i make (so i can remix one step at a time...that way i mess up less)