I work for a rental company who supply sound for a lot of large DJ shows. Last sunday i had a DJM900 fail mid way through the show infront of about 2000 people. The music just went off. Luckily the previous act had been using 2 DJM800s as well as the 900 so patching in another mixer was quick. We re booted the 900 on the bench and it just had a small light flashing on a button labelled 'wake up'. At this point we put it back in its case and it went back to the backline rental company labelled faulty.
If it makes a difference the inputs on all channels were switched to digital with high quality digital cables going to CDJ2000s. I was using the record output for my master. All the DJs, up until this point, had been very well behaved, mixing with input levels at 0 on the meters. However the DJ that was playing when it failed thought we were lying to him when we said it would sound better if he didnt have ALL the lights on. Not even any flashing.
In my work i have to use a lot of different mixers from a lot of different sources. Is there any way of me knowing if this is a common fault across all DJM900s?
I was most disappointed with this failure as i think the 900nexus has a notable sonic improvement over the DJM800 so was glad when it came about.
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I would double check that your firmware is up to date, the latest firmware fixed an issue where the 900 could just shut down
Ver.1.260 -> Ver.1.280 (26 November, 2012 Update)
- Fixed an infrequently-encountered issue where DJM-900 nexus unexpectedly shuts down.
- Fixed an issue where the BPM values on the display may randomly fluctuate
if SLIP function is used on CDJ-2000 nexus or CDJ-900 which is linked to DJM-900 nexus via PRO DJ LINK.
I will check firmware before the doors open on every 900nexus i use from now on!!
Thanks for the help.
no problem,Hopefully its as easy as that for you and it's not hardware related
Exactly. I did mark the mixer with tape in a place where It would probably be left alone. And will do the same with any further 900s i experience this fault with so i can possibly get a vague idea of how widespread it is. Depending on if it happens again.
The only way i can describe how i feel about it is "its not what you want!!" Nobody wants the stress of knowing that the DJ mixer supplying music to lots and lots of people might just turn off at any second! I'm not the sort of engineer who has faults in the audio chain but its very easy for ill-informed people to point the finger when things like that go wrong.
@Will > Rental companies tend not to have much spare time to update all their equipments firmware etc so I would say this was likely the case and for some unfortunate reason, it happened to this particular mixer.