I bought a faulty Pioneer DDJ-1000 Controller - Can I fix it? 

Fancy bringing a water damaged prime 4 back to life 🙏

Great Work 💯

Thank you so much! Been watching your videos since I got my first DDJ-SB2!

Thanks! Definitely something I enjoy doing! A lot of it comes down to the equipment that I can get my hands on since my budget is relatively non-existant however I have a project involving some CDJ-1000MK3s to convert them into MIDI controllers so I'll try to do a video on that at some point. I also plan on doing some more teardowns, not necessarily on DJ equipment but hopefully some of those will be of interest!

Yeah, weirdly Pioneer DJ kit has a ridiculously high resale value, even when faulty. My logic was that this was functional enough that I'd be able to test all of the other parts and part it out to recover some of my costs. The listing also didn't mention the lack of audio output so I paid assuming it was just a faulty looping board and crossfader. I suspect the seller simply didn't test the audio outputs and just tested the output from the laptop itself.

@@camerongray1515 pleased it worked out well in the end

Resale prices for Pioneer kit is high because of the ease of repair. They offer service manuals to anyone online, as well as the parts to fix it, and for those less able, a typical DJ repair shop would do a similar fix for no more than £200, making your total £800 which is a bargain for a product that is suffering major stock issues. Most DJM mixers that have been used in clubs have been repaired once in their life - and still their resale value on the used market is not much lower than new, but enough to make it worth it generally :)

@@futose you sure about that? Have you got links to any of this? Pretty certain you have to be pioneer approved for that and also parts are impossible to get hold of, even for those approved repairers

Plus these controllers/all in one units are nowhere near as robust as CDJ’s or DJM mixers

I bet you could make a good living out of repairing broken DJ equipment. With the DJ equipment Cameroon already has and the pinkyblue flashing lights in the front room he could open a discotheque !

You can't get parts for anything. I just threw mine in the garbage a few weeks ago. After watching this video, I should have given it to someone who needs parts.

Yeah, Pioneer DJ have dreadful availability at the moment (both parts and completed kit) - my logic with this video was that even if I couldn't fix it, I'd be able to make most of my money back by parting it out, especially since it was functional enough to allow me to test all of the parts to see which were working.

Thanks! Definitely would like to do more stuff like this, just really comes down to how well the video does long term due to the costs involved in buying stuff like this, they're definitely fun videos to make though, as long as I can actually fix the issue!

Like Louis Rossmann said, you can never have too much flux 🤣

@@ComradeMario I personally give no flux.

Noted; get lots of flux & Solder on

To be honest, I'm not really an expert with this stuff either so I'm sure you'll be fine! I made a video doing a teardown of the DDJ-400 so that may prove helpful, thankfully it's a much simpler device with mostly single sided boards and reasonably spaced out components which should simplify repair a fair bit.

@@camerongray1515 Indeed! Without your video I would have struggled to tear the thing down. I think it's time to invest in a proper multimeter. Anyone have any mid-price recommendations? I was looking at the UNI-T models.

Hope you're feeling better!

Thanks, admittedly I've never used flux so suspect that's definitely where I was going wrong, if I have any more issues with that connector I'll definitely pick up some flux and try reflowing it

Totally agree. Flux completely transformed my soldering. You would literally just have to coat that with flux and drag-solder across. Get some flux in! I love flux!

Where’s the best place to get lots of flux? ;)) lol

It's not really something I'd really be looking to buy as I don't fix this sort of stuff professionally and wouldn't really have the budget. However I suspect you'd be able to sell it for a fair bit on eBay, even with the channel fader issue.

@@camerongray1515 just posting on eBay.

This is the one I used (for the Rekordbox version but it's probably close enough for the SRT) www.eserviceinfo.com/downloadsm/106375/Pioneer_pioneer%20ddj%201000%20rrv4682%5BX%5D.html. The website is a bit rubbish but this link should directly start a download: www.eserviceinfo.com/download.php?downloadstart=1&fileid=106375

Pricey but unfortunately Pioneer DJ kit holds its value ridiculously well so even faulty kit still sells for a fair bit and this is currently compounded by their supply chain and availability issues that they're experiencing at the moment.

They make good stuff but underrated? Nah man they have almost total monopoly over pro DJ equipment, find me a club/bar/venue using decks that aren't by pioneer. Denon, Native Intruments, shit even Numark comes out with some great controllers/standalones sometimes. Basically anything but pioneer is underated lol

I'm not aware of a particular supplier and Pioneer DJ seem to have pretty bad supply issues at the moment. However, that's a very simple board so personally as long as it's not literally destroyed, I'd look into repairing the board that you have, if it's just a damaged connector then it should be relatively easy to find a replacement and solder it to the existing PCB.

It's not something I do professionally nor am I remotely qualified in so I'm not insured to work on other people's hardware unfortunately. However most DJ kit repair shops will be able to sort this sort of thing. My advice first though would be to try and open it up and dry/clean it out as best you can and don't power it up until you're confident that it has dried out. Most of the damage with mine would have been caused by it sitting covered in liquid (possibly acidic) and becoming even more corroded. If dried out quickly, it may not need any repair at all.

@camerongray1515 ah no worries I understand, I've already dried it out and everything still works apart from the right hand side deck will load and everything but once I press cue or play it gets stuck like a second into the track. Thanks though bud.

It's not something I do professionally (or something I'm really that good at) - it's just more a very casual hobby where my interest seems to come and go. I'd much rather be on the dancefloor in a club rather than in the DJ booth!

@@camerongray1515 Nice! Can't wait to see more of your videos. I really enjoy seeing you review obscure hardware like the 3com machine or installing Linux on a PS2.

I was very lucky in my case - the previously bodged repair on the capacitor was very obvious so that was the first thing I tested. If it hadn't been visually obvious I'd have only been able to find it by either checking the voltages on the appropriate pins to the DAC chip or looking for shorts between the voltage rails feeding the DAC and GND.

It's definitely possible however it's also a bit of a gamble - you could either get a great deal or end up spending a tonne on a controller that you ultimately can't use if it's unfixable - I got very lucky here. If you need a 4 channel controller closer to the price of this faulty DDJ-1000 (Around £600) then something like the DDJ-FLX6 may be a viable option. It's not quite as good as the DDJ-1000 but it's less than half the price new and gives a 4 channel controller with large jog wheels and a reasonably club style layout. It only has RCA outputs however for home use or small venues you could probably get away with an external balancing box if you absolutely need XLR. The only real downsides I can see is that the tempo faders are a bit small and you'd need to use the software to change the effects on both the FX unit and filter knob.

@@camerongray1515 awsome, thank you 🙏 looks like the ddj flx6 is the way to go for me. I’ll just have to do without the xlr for now, looks like a great controller for the price 🎶🎶🎶

Hello ultraentertainment, how are you, I reviewed the ddj1000 that they changed.

Thanks! I'm not an expert on hardware so can't comment on an exact cost but it'll definitely cost a lot less than the amount that they sell it for! With things like this you're very much paying for the fact that it's a relatively niche, low volume product and for the fact that Pioneer DJ essentially has a monopoly in the club/festival DJ market. If you look at something like a CDJ, they cost well over £2000 new and essentially all it is internally is half of one of these controllers (plus the DAC), an LCD screen and some level of built in computational power that's probably not much more complex than a Raspberry Pi 4! As for the mixing being done in software vs hardware, I can't say for sure however I'd generally use whether the mixer works without a computer connected as a guide. With the DDJ-1000 (and your XDJ-XZ), the mixer will operate with the device powered on without a computer connected and also allows you to mix computer audio with external inputs. To me it would make sense to therefore do all of the mixing in the hardware and just have the PC send a single audio stream per deck to the mixer for mixing since the mixer clearly has the capability of doing everything itself and doing so will ensure consistency between the sound of the external inputs and audio coming from the PC and will also reduce processing load on the computer. You can also tell at a hardware level since the DDJ-1000 contains a DSP chip whereas the DDJ-400 doesn't (just a microcontroller and DAC)

@@camerongray1515 Thanks a lot for the thorough reply! Pretty cool stuff! I'll admit it would take me a lot more than $2.5k of time to build a XDJ-XZ myself hahaha. But the engineer in me said "Hey, there's nothing all that special in these things... But they cost as much or more than my computer which can run circles around them with processing power and resources." I am going to watch the rest of your DDJ-400 video soon.

No worries! Speaking of building something, I actually did an interesting project while stuck at home during lockdown where I converted a CDJ-1000MK3 into a MIDI controller. There is an internal SPI bus that links the "top board" (which handles all of the buttons, LEDs, faders, jog wheel and displays) down to the "main board" which handles the CD playback. I disconnected the main board and instead hooked the top board up to an Arduino using this SPI bus and was able to successfully build a working MIDI controller. Still need to finish it up and make a video on it since it's currently sitting as yet another "almost finished project that I'll get around to one day"

@@camerongray1515 That is interesting! So, were these not able to send MIDI signals out of the box to Rekordbox (Dont have a CDJ-1000MK3)? I bet you learned a lot about how these work with that project! One thing I learned from watching all of this is that the architecture is similar to another computer - there are essentially peripheral devices all wired into a "brain". I really like my XDJ-XZ; people swear the CDJs are "higher end" but tbh, I feel for most use cases the difference is negligible and I like that its easier to transport this all-in-one, but I do appreciate that e.g. the DJM-900Nxs2 is made from metal instead of plastic!

@@djovercut Yeah, the CDJ-1000MK3 is a really old model (2006ish) so it's CD playback only (the most advanced it can do is play MP3s back from CDs and store cue points on an SD card). I can see the benefit of a CDJ/DJM setup for a club environment since it's more durable, likely more serviceable and you get more redundancy since if a CDJ were to ever fail/lock up, you would be able to very quickly get going with the other one, but for home or mobile use the XDJs are perfect and basically equivalent in terms of functionality. Same goes for a lot of the newer controllers that have a CDJ+DJM style layout. Especially if you use rekordbox it's easy to practice at home on a controller/XDJ and very easily export your tracks to play on a CDJ including any cue points you have set up. The only real thing to bear in mind there is the limitations of potential CDJ setups since they won't have all of the pad functionality and depending on the generation you may only have 3 hot cues so just need to be prepared for that and especially with hot cues, make your most critical ones the first 3 so that they'll be available on older CDJs.

Unfortunately it's not something I can really offer as a service since I'm in no way trained in any of this, nor do I have any sort of insurance for working on other people's kit. I also got very lucky here, my actual electronics knowledge is relatively limited - high school level *higher technological studies) but nothing more than that. However, those faults don't sound fatal so it's probably worth getting more information from the repair place or getting a second opinion. Not all repair places will do board level diagnostics and repair like this and may rather just replace entire boards and the previous place may not have been able to source replacement boards. A place that does board level diagnostics would at least be able to tell you whether the faults are on the button boards (which would likely be repairable with a few simple components or possibly even just by reflowing some bad solder joints as I found here) or if they're a fault with the. main digital logic board which generally isn't going to be a cheap fix and would require a replacement board.

@@camerongray1515 Thanks for the reply. I got excited when I stumbled onto you fixing this. I was coming from the angle....you probably wouldn't make it worse and it would be a interesting video to follow the pioneer. One day i'll get it working fully again. great vid :)

Just found it on Googling, the websites are all a bit rubbish and dodgy looking but the manual is available, this is the one I used: This is the one I used: www.eserviceinfo.com/downloadsm/106375/Pioneer_pioneer%20ddj%201000%20rrv4682%5BX%5D.html.

@@camerongray1515 ah nice, thank you will archive that in case my ddj-1000 breaks was trying to look for it on google but only found the user manual for the ddj-1000 and the service manual for the djs-1000

@@camerongray1515 nice video btw

Unfortunately not, there's no way I can justify the cost of giving away a device that cost me £600 and is now worth way more. The only way I could feasibly do a giveaway would be if a company specifically sponsored the video.

While I'd love to tear down more controllers, I only own a DDJ-1000 and DDJ-400, I can't justify the cost of buying full price controllers purely to make teardown videos of them.

figured it out, hold shift + beat jump left + play and power on, press blue fx button and cycle to key pad jog, then click various buttons to test...some of my loop functionality is not working although LEDs are--hope this helps someone else

Hello Juan Benitez, how are you? With the test mode, can you factory reset the pioneer ddj1000?@@juanbenitez4918