Korg Revives the Vestax Handy Traxx Portable Turntable

Have you ever just wanted to play your records anywhere? Not in a club, not in a bedroom, not tethered to a setup that takes twenty minutes to unpack. On the beach. In the park. In the back seat of a car on a long drive with someone who actually appreciates what you are playing. If that thought has crossed your mind more than once, you are probably already aware that the options for doing it properly have historically been limited. Vestax had a crack at solving it with the original Handy Trax in the early 2000s, a portable turntable that gave the portablism movement a genuine tool to work with and quietly developed a following far more serious than the format suggested. Korg have now picked up that thread with the handytraxx play, and the story behind it carries some weight.

The unit was developed in close collaboration with Toshihide Nakama, the former President of Vestax and one of the co-creators of the original Handy Trax. Nakama passed away on 10th June 2023, during the development process. That the product exists at all is partly a tribute to his involvement, and Korg have been straightforward about that rather than glossing over it. It matters.

So what has actually changed, and what has been preserved? Quite a lot of both, as it turns out. The handytraxx play keeps the core proposition intact: a self-contained, battery-powered turntable you can take anywhere, with a built-in speaker and a crossfader for scratching. Six AA batteries or an AC adapter, a 2.5W speaker that handles itself respectably for the form factor, and a design that still folds up and goes in a bag. That part of the brief clearly did not change.

What Korg have added is where it gets more interesting. The fader is worth noting first because it is the thing portablists will care most about. It was developed under Nakama’s guidance, which presumably explains why it feels considered rather than bolted on. The motion is smooth, the silent zones have been minimised, and you can swap the crossfader channels to reverse the scratch direction. That last detail is the kind of thing that only makes sense if the people designing it have actually spoken to DJs rather than simply looked at photographs of them.

The effects section is a genuine addition rather than a tick-box exercise. There are three filter types: a DJ filter that blends low-pass and high-pass in the way you would expect from a standard DJ filter, an EQ filter with a low isolator that does something more interesting with the bass register, and a peaking wah with modulation that sits in its own slightly peculiar corner and is probably going to get used a lot once people figure out what it does. On top of that, there is a delay with level control via a vertical fader. The range apparently runs from something ambient and open to something harder and more metallic, which covers a reasonable amount of creative ground for a unit this size.

The looper is the other significant new feature, and it is worth understanding what it actually does before assuming it is a simple record-and-play affair. It captures the live playback of the record in real time, which means you can loop a section of a vinyl record, set it running, and then swap the record out while the loop continues. That is a properly useful function for live performance, not just a demonstration feature. You can also overdub into the loop, so scratching over a looped beat is entirely within scope. Variable speed control covers 33 and 45 RPM with a fine-tune option for pitch adjustment, which adds a further layer of flexibility.

The mechanical side has had attention too. The tonearm is custom designed with high tracing performance in mind, aimed at reducing needle skip during scratch play, which has always been the obvious challenge with portable decks. The motor is belt-driven with digital rotation correction, which handles stability and recovery after the kind of incidental knocks that come with playing outside a controlled environment. These are not glamorous features to describe, but they are the ones that determine whether the thing actually works when you are using it seriously.

Customisation options are practical rather than cosmetic. The headshell accepts both ceramic and MM cartridges, though swapping to MM requires basic soldering, so it is not a five-minute job. The control panel can be reoriented for left-handed use, and the scratch fader is replaceable. Whether that means aftermarket options will eventually appear is unclear, but at least the architecture allows for it.

The product sits in an interesting position. On one hand, it is clearly aimed at people who already understand what portablism is and what the original Handy Trax represented. On the other hand, the addition of effects and a looper makes it genuinely appealing to a broader group of vinyl enthusiasts who want to do something more creative with records than simply play them back. The two audiences are not mutually exclusive, and Korg have presumably done the maths on that.

What it is not is a substitute for a proper setup. Nobody is suggesting you replace your 1200s with this. But that has never been the point of a portable turntable, and framing it that way misses the argument entirely. The handytraxx play is a self-contained instrument that happens to play vinyl, with enough onboard processing to make it worth taking seriously as a performance tool in its own right.

The Vestax Handy Trax earned its reputation by being more capable than it looked. Whether the handytraxx play manages the same trick is something that will take time to establish. The foundations, though, appear to be sound.

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