I got rid of my old radio shack mixer a long time ago and the few times I've DJed over the past several years I've borrowed a friend's Numark CD Mix II but the CD trays never worked correctly. They would close on their own! But lately I've been getting back into the mood to DJ more often. I prefer to DJ with CDs because I make my own custom edits to songs and a lot of my stuff is on CD to begin with. For the digital downloads I've bought, decoding them to WAV to edit/remix them, and then re-encoding them back to MP3 will kill a lot of the quality so I prefer to burn them onto a CD. A lot of new mixers seem to be iPod (you may as well just put an iPod shuffle on random) or otherwise digital media based (laptop connection)... these days it seems you either mix vinyl or you play MP3s. Not a lot of people using CDs anymore. But I've been looking at this:

http://www.amazon.com/Numark-MIXDECK...dp/B0038YX386/

Which lets you use both CDs and digital music... I could keep an MP3 player and laptop (or netbook) around as a backup in case I wind up losing a CD or need a track that I don't normally have. I'm more of a party DJ than "club DJ", I do most of my mixing beforehand but I like the option to be able to do it with the mixer as well. I don't really consider myself a "pro", either. I don't need a lot of fancy features, my main concern is portability and ease of use. I was trying to find something more in the $350 range, but I keep coming back and looking at that one. On the other hand, the way the CD trays on the CD Mix II are broken/wonky makes me wonder about the quality, but this one seems to have slot loading players and it's a more "professional" model.

Thoughts, opinions, reviews? Hmm, I really shouldn't be spending the money anyway.