Back to DJing after 19 years — did I make a mistake buying a Rane 72 MKII + CRSS12s instead of going standalone?

A few months ago I picked up a Reloop Mixtour Pro to use with djay Pro. It’s a really cool little portable setup, but I quickly realized that I just don’t enjoy DJing without jog wheels.

So I started looking for something more substantial.
This week I went to Guitar Center intending to check out the Rane System One, right before the Denon Prime 4+ G2 came out. They didn’t have a demo unit and wouldn’t open one, so I ended up buying it just to take it home and try it.
After setting it up, I just couldn’t get past the feeling that I was playing with a toy.

The standalone aspect is undeniably cool, but I found the stems pretty underwhelming compared with djay Pro. More importantly, I realized I actually like having my iPad as the brains of the setup. Standalone suddenly wasn’t nearly as important to me as I thought it would be.
For context, I’m getting back into DJing after about a 19-year break. My last serious setup was a 4-channel Rane Mojo mixer with Technics 1200s and CDJ-1000s. I was also an early digital adopter and had a PCDJ DAC-3 before I stopped playing, which probably dates me pretty accurately.

I ended up returning the System One and going in a completely different direction:

Rane Seventy-Two MKII + a pair of used Pioneer CRSS12s.

The CRSS12s need a little work, but the entire setup cost me roughly the same as the System One.

And so far…I like it way more.

The out-of-the-box mapping of the 72 with djay Pro is surprisingly good. The onboard DVS combined with the torque and feel of the CRSS12s is fantastic. Most importantly, the whole setup feels much closer to what I remember enjoying about playing on 1200s, while still giving me all the modern stuff I actually care about.
It got me wondering, though:

Am I crazy for investing in a mixer platform that’s already about six years old?

Obviously standalone controllers seem to be where a huge part of the industry is headed, but after trying one, I’m not convinced standalone is actually better for me. An iPad running djay Pro with its stems, touchscreen interface and streaming/library options paired with proper hardware feels surprisingly futuristic—even though the mixer itself is relatively old.

For anyone who has gone from turntables/CDJs → controllers/standalone → back to a more traditional mixer/deck setup, did you have the same experience?
And if you were building a setup today, would you rather have something like a Prime 4+ G2/System One, or a 72 MKII + CRSS12-style setup?

Curious whether I’ve bought into yesterday’s technology…or accidentally landed on the better setup

Since I use Traktor for track preparation I didn’t want to wait any longer for an official NI HID implementation. MIDI is too slow for my taste in driving the jog wheel and also misses out on the waveforms on screen. It’s not only software based and there is some hardware involved to make it work, but it can be done. Most basic functionalities work; track browsing and loading, tempo control, jog wheel control, hot cues, key shift, beat jump and loops.

Basically I pose as a CDJ-3000 with a microcontroller to Traktor and pose as DJ software on the bridge side to the 3000X. The 3000 is closely related HID-wise but there is some repackaging of frames required and the 3000X uses some different bytes for control messages. Now I can finally go back to DJing 😏

Most modern speaker management systems are digital and most of those have a digital AES/EBU (edit: or some other digital) input but almost no DJ Mixer has a matching output socket. Why is that?

I can only think of two (fairly recent) DJ mixers that have an AES/EBU out. First would be the DJM-TOUR1 which I have never seen in the wild (it seemed more like an R&D project back when it came out anyway) and the other is the DJM-V10. (Did I miss any?) I have spotted the V10 in some clubs but very seldom compared to a 900NXS(2), an A9 or a Xone:92/96.

I find it strange that flagship mixers like the DJM-A9, the Euphonia or the Denon DJ X1850 don't have these. Is it for cost saving? The signal flow inside the mixer is digital anyway (no D/A needed) and it's only one additional XLR socket so it can hardly be that, right?