Lecci Pocket Sized DJ mixer

While browsing the pages of thinkgeek I stumbled across this little guy:

The little mixer open on my desk

Incase you hadn’t already guessed, it is a little DJ mixer that runs on 4x AAA battery’s. Branded with Lecci in embossed Letters on top of the lid.

I thought it looked so cool, before I even realised, I had it in my shopping cart, and was buying it. Once I realised I didn’t really need, or have a use for it, it was too late.

After opening the packet, I was a little underwhelmed by the build quality of the mixer, but then again, for $25 you can hardly expect the moon, so its easy to overlook the finer details. One of the volume knobs wasn’t stuck together, so the chrome outer part would spin, while the plastic part would stay still, making it hard to actually adjust the volume. Thats not a massive issue though, as a little bit of glue would see that staying in the right place.

In the packed there was the mixer itself, as well as 2 short, and 1 longer 3.5mm headphone jack leads

Then its time to pop in some batteries. Like any other battery operated device, flip over the back, and slide the battery cover off to reveal the spot to put 4 AAA batteries in the back.

The connections are 3.5mm headphone jacks. There are 4 jacks in total. On the left side there are two labeled A and B, and on the right side are labeled (with pictures) headphones and speaker out

the input ports for the mixer

The output ports

Now to test the sound. With the lid open, I hit the big red button on the top of the unit, and immediately blinded by the ultra bright blue LED. I remember the time when a regular strength red or green LED would have done nicely as a power status light.

Plugging one input into my laptop, and the other input into my mp3 player, and headphones into the headphone output, the first thing I notice is the noise coming through the headphones, even before there is any inputs plugged in, which seemed to be volume independent . The same effect is also present on the speaker outputs also. This is probably the biggest letdown with the mixer.

Crossfading seems to work OK. There isn’t a whole lot of complication to it really. The controls you are presented with are Power, Headphone volume, Output volume, headphone channel select, and of course, Crossfade.

Headphone monitoring is selected by a 3 position switch, which lets you select Channel 1 when left, Channel 2 when switched right, and both of them when the switch is centered.

As is often the way with things like this, after I had a quick play, I flipped it over and found the screws to take the back off. Once the screws were off, I popped out the crossfader knob, and the white top came right off, showing the inside in all its glory

The top of the mixer unscrewed

As you can see from the above picture, there isn’t a whole lot inside, which is about what I was expecting. Almost half the case is taken up with the battery compartment.

A couple of extra screws on the PCB, and it popped out too. The back side of the board shows the relatively sparse board, with just 2 IC’s (which I’m guessing are probably both OPamps of some description)

Back of the PCB

Conclusion:

It was obvious from the outset that this mixer is little more than a toy. It might be fun to play with at a party with friends, or in your room by yourself, but you are obviously not going to do much serious work with it.

The build quality was acceptable, but could have been better, but for the low low price, you could hardly complain. The audio quality was the biggest letdown for me, with a really noticable hiss that you can’t reduce in any way. Again, I guess coming from its price point, it’s probably acceptable, But I was expecting a lot better.