Summary - Audio quality is extremely good, the sounds are universally bright, powerful and punchy. There has been quite some careful effects processing applied, mainly EQ and compression, but its fairly subtle if that's not a contradiction. For example snare drums stand out as they sound like its a huge snare drum being hit with a mallet rather than because its dripping in delay and reverb. There is little noticeable noise anywhere, track 28 suffers from some hiss and a few of the Loop Bitz tracks have some ambience and background noise but nothing serious.

I'll confess to being a little sceptical of this release at first, it had received a couple of low magazine review scores and upon seeing the "decksploitation" tracks I wasn't too hopeful. However on listening through the release on numerous occasions it certainly overcame any initial opinion I may have had.

The main part of the CD, the Full Grooves, really do have a cutting bite to many of them, the actual sounds themselves are excellent and these have been crafted into some excellent beats. Powerfully processed drums layered with some intelligent and appropriate fill effects make for some first class loops. With these as a base you have the basis of a whole number of excellent tracks. Perhaps more importantly a number of these really sound like they would "work", real club floor fillers.

The Loop Bitz section seems a little plain in comparison as it has not had the processing applied to the raw live drum loops, though they are still a fine collection of live drum loops.

All is not rosy though, I'm against the idea of including sounds on a sample CD that aren't usable by the purchaser in a commercial release, to me it rather defeats the object of the exercise. In this case it is somewhat mitigated by the fact you still get over an hour of usable samples and that the target audience for this release is more DJ orientated than some. I'd preferred to have seen these in a separate section, and indicated in some way on the packaging, maybe as a "bonus" section advert for the decksploitation project.

There is some work to get the most out of the sounds on the CD, but the raw materials are there and as a base there are some excellent sounds and grooves here. In an ideal world it would have been good to have had the component sounds of the Full Grooves as well, would have made the customisation of the loops somewhat more user friendly, but you can't have everything.

Overall - If your looking to make hard edged dance music then get this - 8/10.

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