my final analysis is that yes there is some learning curve, you can't expect useful results right out of the box, it does take a few days to get used to it, I had more useful results using it connected to the aux/rec output of my mixer rather than the headphone output, I would recommend this setup to beginners...
I don't like the incremental jog wheel, I would prefer to have more precise control, it was fine most of the time, but there were enough occasions where the particular character of the beats and the exact ammount of correction needed to align them to the record playing were such that one increment would sound just a little too fast while the next lowest one would sound a little too slow, not a major trainwreck but like I said I personally prefer more precision
also I don't like the way there is no button to restart all loops, I understand how advantageous it is to have all loops cycling continuosly, but if you disengage the unit for a few minutes and then try to engage it again the loops will be WAY out of sync with the record you're playing, and it takes a lot of jog wheel adjustment to get them back on, if you could just restart them from 0 at the touch of a button then they would sync up again instantly, or at worst would be one or two increments off which could be corrected in a second
with my unit I definitely experienced drifting between 2 loops which should never happen, this happened twice, each time I'd sample a 4 beat loop and then a 1 beat loop from the same record and then continue mixing records with the bpm engine engaged like in a normal set. On a third trial I got the loops to stay perfectly synced to each other for hours but that time I just left them cycling without continuing to play records so there was no new input to the bpm engine, though I did feedback the output into itself and also manually readjusted the bpm value to see if uneven time stretching was the problem... maybe it's just a defective unit, or maybe it's just a tempermental device, but in any case the sampled loops should never drift apart from each other, not even once
this may sound like all cons, but there are many pros which have been mentioned in all the other reviews, great dj's are getting great results from the cycloops/c-loops so take my analysis for what it's worth, but on the other hand it's still not entirely clear to me if the the Soundbite/Grabber is as good as the original product that these well known dj's are using, the new features are great, but there may be some bugs, or maybe I'm hallucinating, time will tell....
