When a groundbreaking product disrupts the market, it always have a limited life span

This product was supposed to be Stanton introduction to professional DVS market. The SCS.1M mixer and SCS.1D turntable were the two products making the "Stanton SCS System".

Before its release, marketing was super aggressive from Stanton and at NAMM where the SCS system was thought to be released, Stanton pushed back the release by showing a demo of SCS.1D controlling Ableton Live clips and announcing further advancements in the development of the system.

Everybody was in awe and wanted a digital turntable that could control Ableton Live in a typical DJ setup-manner; by being able to "scratch" Live clips so the community kind of forgive Stanton, almost a year passes by and Stanton finally releases the system but not without much pressure from the community.

What happened next was totally unexpected: the two products (1D and 1M) were lemons. Displays gave up life quickly and displayed weird characters, Traktor support was very limited and scratch performance was sub par, part because of NI, part because of Stanton.

DJ community has no patience for unreliable gear; their set getting interrupted by a bug will only happen once as it's not worth risking breaking a good vibe by a digital error noise. And around the same period, Serato was quickly becoming the DVS standard, and EDM DJ's didn't mind using CDJs which were widely available and built to endure club night life, drink spills and other casualties that can happen.

Stanton quickly discontinued the SCS System, everyone who bought the units for close to $2K (iirc) was mad and ditching Stanton on forum boards and mainly Skratchworx.com, a now defunt website which was a very good reference for everything hip-hop DJing and DMC.

So as of now, while Stanton still exist and produces one of the best Super OEM DJ turntable of all time - namely the ST-150 but is nowhere near the promise of a digital DJing future lead by their expertise.

Then one day, a large distributor liquidated its stock and sold over 300 units on eBay for ridiculous prices. That's when I bought a couple of ones and fiddle with them.

Afterlife: While support in Traktor was super sketchy, VirtualDJ supported the SCS System until just a couple of releases ago. Scratch performance is very great and one could argue it's the second-best 100% digital turntable controler experience next to Serato Twelve. I still use it for scratch-only duties and since I'm not DJ Q-Bert it is fine for what it does.

Same sad story as the SCS.1D...

For more information about the SCS series, please see my SCS.1D review.

Like the SCS.1D, the mixer has display issues which caused Stanton to discontinue the SCS series.

This 4 channel mixer controller is as innovative as the SCS.1D was; a large dial allows you to scroll your library quickly and precisely, pressing it to enter a folder. Virtual dJ is the perfect companion for this mixer, as it offers native support for it. The crossfader is a once-a-legend Pro X-Fade which is an aftermarket upgrade crossfader. The SCS.1M was the second mixer to sport the Pro X-Fade, after Audio Innovate own's AEM-100 and AEM-100i. It allows for lightning fast cuts, an essential feature to scratch DJs and turntablists.

It's also an audio interface, with headphones, booth and main outputs, and rca inputs with phono ground for use with a turntable or other line-level sources.

While it's pretty rare these days, it's still an excellent control surface to any DJ software that supports it, or a DAW.