The well-built casing inspires confidence in the player as does the skip resistance. You can literally bang the player on your table and you basically won’t hear it skip until you break it. Pioneer accomplishes this near miracle with a combination of a skip-proof buffer and a CD drive that sits in an oil-dampened suspension. No other deck in the price range that I’m aware of has this functionality.
No other deck in the price range has pitch increments of .02% either. Though many will argue about whether or not it matters, few decks have this feature at all. And to see it on a deck that costs about $400 is impressive. The pitch slider itself, however, is a bit loose for my taste and because of that, the numerical purists out there might complain that the pitch reading jumps sporadically in increments of .04 or.06 percent. Again, that has nothing to do with the deck but rather with getting used to its controls.
The deck comes with three built-in pre-mixer effects: Jet, Zip, and Wah. Jet is a Phaser effect, similar to a very strong Flanger. Zip is a pitch-shifting effect. I don’t believe it adjusts in increments smaller than a semitone, and don’t expect to be able to mix harmonically with it. It causes audible distortion almost as soon as you start using it that works for the effect, but not for trying to bring an off-key song in tune. Wah is a hybrid filter. The jog wheel, and its hold/reset button, is the only control for these effects and they cannot be used on top of one another. For the Jet effect, the jog adjusts the speed, for the zip effect it adjusts the pitch shift up or down, and for the Wah effect it alters the cutoff frequency of a filter. They all sound pretty good, but they don’t give the functionality you’d need to get really creative with them.
The CDJ-200 takes looping almost straight off the CDJ-800. It has an automatic 4-beat loop, a beat cutter, and no limit to the length of the track that can be looped. It also has a loop-out point adjust (accomplished with the jog wheel) but no loop-in adjust. The beat-cutter only has 1 button to cut a loop in half which will also double the length of a loop if you press it while holding one of the folder search buttons. It’s a very nice and simple implementation once you figure out how to create longer loops.
I honestly believe that mp3 functionality is a joke, but since I know others have other opinions, I did test them and other than longer loading times everything works the same with mp3 audio or CD audio. The folder searching was nice and it read id3 tags encoded with Winamp or iTunes without a problem.