The introduction of faders to the DJ mixer market came with the GLI series of consumer mixers that offered a far lower price point than the commercial Bozak club mixer. Faders are cheaper and smaller than knobs, which allowed GLI to build the “poor man’s Bozak” for aspiring DJs (a new species which had not existed a few years earlier).

But it wasn’t just bedroom disco jocks who drove the market. By the early 80s, two other scenes were buoying demand for mixers. The first was hip-hop DJs, inspired by the early experiments by DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash. Both pioneers used GLI mixers (along with other home-rigged tools) to create the breaks-centered style of hip-hop DJ mixing. This rapid back-and-forth style between records required a special kind of slider, the crossfader. Crossfaders had also existed on radio mixing boards for years, allowing DJs to switch audio sources with one hand instead of two. But in the hands of these innovators, the manipulation of the vinyl on the turntable and the crossfader, became a dexterous art form unto itself.

The other community driving the DJ mixer market was the mobile DJ industry. By the early 80s, DJs had become the standard entertainment at even the most mundane social gatherings — school dances, weddings, bar mitzvahs, etc. While playing the Chicken Dance for 13-year-olds might seem miles away from Larry Levan at Paradise Garage, the two communities crossed over more often than one might expect.

Mike Fotias is production manager for the Movement: Detroit Electronic Music Festival, responsible for the dozens of DJ set-ups and festival-grade sound systems running simultaneously through the annual Memorial Day Weekend event. Fotias’ pedigree for powering DJ parties runs through the history of Detroit techno. But it goes back even earlier, to his days as a mobile DJ in the early 80s.

“There was a market for people to come play pre-recorded music at events,” Fotais reflects of his mobile DJ days. “Which spurred a market for equipment needed to do that job.” Like most music mixers of that era, especially those outside of the major club hubs of New York, L.A., or Miami, Fotais was forced to make due with a melange of early DJ equipment and homemade solutions.

“An original Urei rotary DJ mixer was something I had never seen. It was like a unicorn,” he laughs. “It was like $3,000 in 1980s money. You didn’t even think about it.”

Foton (as his old rave colleagues often call him), recalls Numark as one of the first manufacturers to get a DJ mixer in the hands of the masses.

“The first super cool 19-inch Numark DM1775 mixer had five sliders and four seconds of sampling memory. It was built like a tank. All the sheet metal was 1/8 inch-thick aluminum and steel. The sample had a big start/stop push button, and four smaller buttons that each represented one second of memory.”

Hitting the market in the mid-1980s, the sampling feature of the mixer might seem ahead of its time, but it came out during the same era as the the immensely popular Casio SK-1 sampling keyboard. Although mostly a novelty, these tools did offer an early glimpse at the digital domain that would eventually become universal in music playback and production. But while the 1775 offered the futuristic sampling feature, it lacked the far more functional separate EQs for each audio channel. Individual channel EQ were first introduced to the DJ mixer market in 1980 by U.K. company Formula Sound, but while considered utterly essential today (how else would one drop the bass?), in 1985, the feature still had not found its way to the Numark model.

It’s unlikely that Numark was unaware of the EQ possibility. The company simply considered the sampler to be a more important feature, given the size and cost restrictions of what feature sets could be put in a single unit for a reasonable price. This compromise between size, quality, and cost has shaped the DJ mixer throughout its history.

That cost-to-capabilities formula came into serious question in the mid-90s, when Japanese consumer audio company Pioneer entered the DJ market with its DJM series of digital mixers. Released around the same time as the company’s CDJ series of CD players for DJs, the DJM offered an array of effects processing built into the mixer, including delay, reverb, and flange, as well as an automated BPM counter that would sync the effects to the beat. Although a revelation for many DJs who were thrilled to have a new ways to tweak and toy with the music they were playing, the DJM-500 and 600 was a nightmare for sound guys like Fotias, due to its inferior sound quality — a compromise undoubtedly made to accommodate the new effects.

“They weren’t using the best components, they weren’t worried about sound quality,” Fotias recalls. “It was about how many mixers they could build and sell. It was our cross to bear, because all the the DJs had it on their tech rider, and we had to deal with it. How do we make this sound good?”

Jim Tremayne, the long-running editor of industry magazine DJ Times, sees the early DJM mixers in a more forgiving light. “The original DJM 500, even though it didn’t have the best preamp inside for clubs, had amazing features and effects. It was really fun to make mixtapes with those. It changed the game a bit. Took all those effects from an outboard unit and put it in the mixer. That concept still exists with the DJM 900 Nexus. It has all kinds of crazy onboard stuff.”