I’ve seen huge complaints with other budget decks with regards to rejecting some burned CDs, and these things haven’t spit up a single thing yet. They play CDs scratched so badly that my Sony Walkman won’t even play them. They skip doing it, but they still do it better. I buy the cheapest media I can find, because I honestly don’t think it makes a difference, an these decks seem to support my theory. As I said, my 2 decks haven’t had a single CD they just wouldn’t read.
The unit’s biggest downfall, however, is it’s jog wheel. Never mind that it has 3 functions (pitch bending, effects control, and loop out adjust) depending on exactly what you’re doing, and it just doesn’t feel right. Because of the brushed metal finish, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to move and it feels a bit tight to my hands. I actually put a piece of tape on each of mine similar to a turntablist marking samples to give me a bit more grip and to provide a visual reference for how far I was turning the wheel each time I use it. For a deck so focused on mixing performance, they really should have tried a bit harder to get a jog wheel that performed as expected, as I’m not the only person who doesn’t like it. Some people I’ve talked to prefer the older, rubber jog wheel of the CDJ-100. While I haven’t used it, if it was like the jog wheel on the EFX-1000, I’d agree. Pitch bending, especially, feels weird on these decks even after owning at least one for the better part of 7 months.
CDJ 200