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I was 12 years old when my fascination with the Technics 1200 turntables began. Those were the B-Boy days and I spent my days breakdancing and frantically scooping up old belt drive turntables from garage sales, violently ripping through copies of Grandmaster Flash's Wheels of Steel. Back then I had a little mixer from Radio Shack -- and that pretty much speaks for itself. Any attempts to obtain a "professional" mixer for turntables at a local music store were pretty futile. "Scratching", like spinning on one's head, was generally considered a goofy fad.
Well times do change (or evolve ... or revolve, as it were) and since the deletion of vinyl, the use of the record-playing turntable as a music-making device has become a respected art form, and the "turntablists" regarded as professional, creative artists. Some things do not change, though -- the Technics 1200s still remain the turntable of choice, and Vestax mixers the ones to link them up.
Vestax has been building professional DJ mixers for a long time, and their PMC line has helped not only validate the professional status of many DJs but through their durability, functionality, and sonic prowess helped to expand the creative and artistic usage of mixing and scratching. The mixer of choice for scratchers and mixers was the awesome PMC-05 PRO, a beautifully designed mixer that was made for scratching. Vestax has since introduced variations on that theme, and the newest is the PMC-07 PRO. Billed as the "ultimate professional scratch mixer", the PMC-07 PRO is very similar to the PMC-05 PRO, but with some very innovative additions.
The Front Panel
There are 4 input sections:
MIC input: main and sub, each with its own gain/volume, separate bass and treble faders (+/- 12 dB) and a pan fader.
The Back Panel
On the back are two phono inputs (each with a dedicated ground), two line inputs, two mic inputs, a stereo "session mix" in, and two stereo master output sections -- one set for line level output via standard RCA jacks, and the other for balanced applications via TRS 1/4-inch jacks.
PGM 1 and 2
Line and phono inputs, selected by a multi-adjustable input switch (more on this later); a gain control, which is applied to...