Native Instruments present Traktor Kontrol S4
Aug 18, 2010 Blogging Bee, Music Gear
Native Instruments have finally decided to jump seriously on a juicy market of consoles. Traktor is undoubtedly a reference in the DJing world along side Ableton live, and their Kontrol X1 module wasn’t “perfect”. It might have been cool for beginners or intermediate DJs, but it couldn’t offer what a professional DJ searched for and wanted. Besides having to carry 2 modules and the hassle of empty ports, na it wasn’t cool at all.
Now the question is, will the Kontrol S4 fix all this ?
We’ll have to wait and see until we get our hands on this baby. But one thing is sure, NI thought of everything that the other consoles didn’t have and decided to attack and spot on with this console.
It’s an all-in-one module that can replace, any digital/analog equipement you have and a soundcard (think of the USB ports you’ll be saving). It’s optimized and engineered to work with Traktor with small latencies, giving you a nice and smooth DJing experience. There are no words yet on its compatibility with other NI products (if there is, I haven’t read them yet), so we’ll have to wait and see for that.
The Traktor version presented in the videos seem different from the Traktor Pro version. Yet another question to be answered.
The prensentation video states that the console isn’t just like any MIDI console, and I think it uses a propriatery protocol for software/hardware communication. A shame to find that every manufacturer is creating his own standard, while MIDI is left to rot down the caves and no joint effort is made to normalize all this. We’ll see how that will go.
Until then, I am excited to see this new console come to life, however I will not change from my current setup which includes Traktor managed by a third party console and mixer.
So what do you think of it ?
Tags: kontrol s4, Native instruments
