Allen & Heath announces new flagship Xone:96 DJ mixer

The industry standard gets a long overdue revamp.

Allen & Heath is upgrading its flagship DJ mixer. The Xone:96 – which doesn’t yet have a price or release date – replaces the Xone:92, Allen & Heath’s professional DJ mixer for 15 years.

According to a press release, the Xone:96 includes a dual Traktor Scratch-certified soundcard and a second independent headphone cueing system, which the company says “allows for smoother set transitions and back-to-back performances.”

It also features Allen & Heath’s four-band EQ with Xone:VCF filters, dedicated booth outputs with a new three-band booth EQ, USB port for computer connection, two dedicated FX sends and two stereo inputs with three-band parametric EQ.

One of the most significant changes is the addition of a new “crunch” effect that adds harmonic distortion before the filter stage. It appears to replace the Xone:92’s LFO control, which is absent from the Xone:96.

Allen & Heath’s Xone:92 – which was released in 2003 – was one of the earliest DJ mixers to feature MIDI for controlling DJ software and external devices. Over the past decade the Xone:92 has become a fixture of many club setups.

Xone:92 designer Andy Rigby-Jones has since teamed up with Richie Hawtin to design and build their own mixer, the PLAYdifferently Model 1.