Herc Controller long overdue mini-review

A good while ago got to take a look at the beast but the initial look got overtaken with a host of problems, sorry for the delay here is my look at it.

When I first heard about the new Traktor version for the Hercules controller I already knew what the original controller reviews were like and had seen the Hercules controller a few times. I also have a DM2 myself don't use it much these days but had something useful to compare it to. When it was originally spoken about it almost sounded like an upgraded controller which peaked my interest, so when I got the opportunity to try out the new controller a couple of weeks ago I jumped at the chance to go make some noise.

After doing just a little research and weighing of things I was not completely surprised to find we had Traktor bundled with the current model controller. This initially had me worried as the critical reviews I have seen from DJ were not kind especially those in the community that scratch.

A nice thing about the 'Herc' Box is that it has audio built in via a USB sound device, and it supports ASIO after a fashion. To be sure I gave the setup a fair shake I used my standard Ghost 'Roll the O/S' trick and put on a totally fresh O/S installation that has absolutely NOTHING installed except Symantec antivirus software. Any problems we have were going to be inherent in the Herc setup on my box not the O/s or other contributing factors. It’s a little disconcerting to note the device is listed as having a "USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 port (dedicated USB root hub recommended)" indicating the device is a USB 2.0 device. We were never able to get the device into USB2.0 mode and could not crack open the box to look and see what the interface type was. I have held a long standing position that more than 2 channels at > 16bit on a USB Bus over-subscribes the data bus and you can expect audio problems as a result. I'm also aware of people here that routinely run USB 1.1 devices on Traktor and have no problems, But I'm aware of lots of people also do have problems and I understand that some systems are actually compressing the data being fed to the audio device in the USB chain. I have no idea what the herc device does but it works pretty darn well for a decent part of the time. However we saw far and away enough audio breakdown in the 2 hour workout we ran to be concerned. At low latency 11MSec we could play for about 5-7 mins with noticing any breakup then things would slide downhill. At ~25Msec things were a lot better but not good enough for live or recorded play. At ~56 Msec things were better still but now control latency reared its ugly head and we could see noticeable delays in controller - audio output function. Still though, the sound is rich and full while playing well. What we could not get to work was the use of my Echo indigo and the contrl surface. When we enabled the controller in Traktor for the control surface it forced you to use the Audio portion too. Given its a packaged deal, I guess its OK for some, sorry to say it doesn't fly for may needs.

On to the control surface. One nice thing about the Herc controller is the mouse emulation. When it works it saves going to your regular mouse. What I found though that when mixing full on and feeding other controller functions to the system the mouse became erratic and would stall and jump around. Another problem I had was the loop selectors. There are 3 buttons to select loop length and Traktor standard has 4 default lengths 1,4,8,16 I'm always jumping lengths and positions and the way the buttons setup I felt like I had one hand tied behind my back additionally there is no loop move function so you are further hamstrung. Also not present on this version is control of timestretching which I use extensively. If the big controls wheels and crossfader I have the following to say…. I do not like the feel, responsiveness and accuracy of either. I'm no scratch DJ. But even I could not make the crossfader work well enough to mix effectively with. Once again we could not crack open the box but the crossfader feels like a loosened standard potentiometer. Guys if you want real DJ's to buy into this put a real live quality crossfader control in the box. Of the wheels I can say I like my mouse. Thet are simply not fine enough controlled or accurate enough to make them feel good except for basic cueing. Forget about trying to wind forward or back to set up beat grids. Another point to note in general of the controls I found them to be generally OK but when the box is placed under load when mixing hard the controls occasionally skipped and once or twice seemed to stick momentarily ruining otherwise OK mixes. I should note that these issue were not seen when working one deck only.


Construction-wise the controller is NOT built for a true pro DJ. When packed it has jacks and knobs exposed. We had two tight RCA connectors that made the connectors (and I suspect the PC board inside) flex noticeably and worryingly, a design issue in its own right. The unit is all plastic with some aluminum overlays and just does not feel tough. Likewise the knobs, sliders and wheels do not "feel" pro grade. For beginning bedroom DJ's this thing might work. However my recommendation for any beginning DJ who wants to learn to do it 'today' is to learn to fly things with your keyboard for a start, especially if you plan to take part in laptop battles where almost always controllers are not permitted. For the Pro's I think the answer is pretty clear 'this is an interesting box' but its not your holy grail and in it's present form I don't think its even remotely close.

 

Phil,

So I can get some idea of the over all quality of the Herc controller, What would you rate the Herc, & DM2, uc-17 & Faderfox a 1-10 scale?

When I first was looking for a controller I almost bought a herc until i read reviews in here.

I like my uc-17, but I still want to get a faderfox.

 

Nice one Phil...thanks! I still havent bought a controller and as you say am mastering using keyboard shorcuts and a mouse first so I can always fall back on it. No way I'm getting a Herc now, especially at the price...it sounds terrible!

I guess its faderfox or kontrol dj..maybe behringer bcd2000 when it comes out in October?

 

I just looked at the specs for the BCD2000 and its USB 1.1 for both Control and Audio. Looks like that beast is out of contention Looks Like the Kontrol DJ is about what is left.

To be fair though I'm gonna wait to see what the BCD2000 is really like but I'm not going to invest in one without the opportunity to give it a long hard workout. It would be great to get one to do an early review on but that I think will be unlikely.

Phil

 

I have the Hercules Controller bundle, and have been meaning to write a review on it for quite a while. Unfortunatly I'm quite busy with work, university and my family, and have not had enough time to play around with it so that I could write one that would be as extensive as what I would have hoped for before ordering.

Most of the things I read about the controller before ordering where negative, so I had a pretty good idea on the weakneses existing. All in all, for a bedroom muso I believe the package is great value for money, and works well.

I have used it on my notebook (based on intel centrino) and my desktop (shuttle nforce3). On the notebook it works without any glitches, but on the shuttle there are occasionally small cuts in audio. I blame this on the shuttle, as even my ipod does'nt work with it.

First thing I did, was downloaded the new drivers from hercules. The version shipped with it is very old, and it also comes with an ancient firmware. I would recomend doing this.

I don't know if it was due to the new firmware, or something else, but the knob for "volume" controls bpm, and the long slider (that should probably be bpm) controls volume. Not an issue once you remember it.

I find most features work very well, though I have to keep the latency far higher then I would prefere (I used to keep it at 5ms with my old pci soundcard). I can't find any use for the mouse stick, as (for the moment) my music is very unorganised, and I have a few thousand songs to browse through. With a well organised (100 or so) songs, it would probably do it's job well. I have not noticed any glitches while using it on either computer. I'm not very fond of the buttons on the top used for selecting cue / loop / fx ect. It's not easy to quickly switch from que to loop or vice versa, something I need to do now and then.

I had problems importing my collection to traktor due to corrupt mp3 files. After editing the mp3 files details (artist, song name ect) it worked fine.

I'll still write a detailed review one day unless one pops up elsewhere, as it would have made my purchase decision alot easier, unfortunatly I still don't have time to make it myself just now.

For anyone used to mixing with a very robust controller or a hardware mixer and vinyl, I would give a word of warning. For anyone who is a bedroom muso who just want's to play around, I can warmly recomend the hercules.

 

Yeah... Only issue there for me is that you've got to 'shift' (use the select button toggle) to change the rotaries from filter to eq/gain mode. Apparently Faderfox has a bank of rotaries for each. Not sure how much of a problem this would be though as I don't think I'd need to use both at the same time much...

 

Phil, my thought is to forget the sound capability of the BCD2000, and use it purely as a control surface. USB1.1 should be plenty good enough for that task.

Of course, I'm only speculating that this is possible. The release date for the product keeps getting pushed back. As I said recently in another forum, my fear is that Friedemann and Co. are doing the software. *grin*

 

Re: Herc Controller - mac version - sweet

Well .. i just bought the hercules "MAC Version" and i have to say im quite blown away by it, feature, sound and so far (touch wood) reliability..so i guess my own view-point on the mac version.

The good...

Everything works excatly as it should!

Latency - 10ms with no audio glitches or weirdness of any sort

Headphone volume - blows the head off me (low impedence ones)

Faders and jog wheels and knobs all work great, and plenty good for looping and cueing accurately

itunes import worked a treat, and all done in a few mins from my external hard drive despite a few corrupt files..

The Bad

Mouse "joystick" isnt worth crap...better to use the trackpad to select tracks

It has a really cheap plasticy feel to it, although no worse than th uc33 controller i dont think, and the faders ..well i have felt worse .. even on real(ish) dj mixers!!! *gasp* (thankfully not that often though)

headphone/RCA's/Mic sockets do feel like the weak link ... if anything is gonna break they will ... but nothing a custom flightcase and a bit of soldering wont prevent (might even fit in one of those make-up aluminium boxes!)

The software

It works and does what its ment to and the layout makes the whole package as comfortable as hardware.. it'd be nice to see a few features added / ammended to though

1. looping only up to 1/4/8 beats ..4/8/16 would have been much more useful.

2. Autofade function ... (yes im lazy for the first hour!)

3. unless the pitch fader is set to 50% the onscreen fader only moves a small bit (im usually set at 10%) i like seeing where the fader is for reference- even a virtual one.

4. cueing ... I thought the "Fine" option would have been standard..took me a while to figure it out (manuals ?? what manuals)

Altogether i think its a great little controller and soundcard for the price - and you get a decent optimized dj soft thrown in for the money i reckon it'll definetly pay its way and even if it does break .. its only 200 euro! i used to spend more than that in 2 weeks on vinyl

Also I dont belive there is anything on the market that is as full featured out there for the mac platform .. behringer bca2000 looked interesting for a while (and at one point i did see mac drivers mentioned before release of bca2000).

Next step - .. try to work out how to get 2.6 demo happening with it?? (i really want the 16 beat loops!)

hope this helps someone in their purchase...

 

You are right, with Kontrol-dj you can't EQ at the same time as using the built in filters. However, Traktors EQs are pretty bad in my opinion (serious distortion at +12db - maybe its a soundcard thing??) while the filters are pretty good - so, the best setup, although not the most portable, is to have an external mixer for EQing and deck volume... whilst using Kontrol-Dj for all other controls. Then you can assign Kontrol-Djs rotaries to be dedicated Filter rotaries.

Once i did this i discovered how using filters carefully combined with EQs can really make a difference to a mix...

hope this helps....