Rhythm System mk6 Review: The 55 Inch Transparent DJ Screen, and What It Costs

Every few years the transparent DJ screen comes back around. Smithson Martin’s Emulator arrived about fifteen years ago, put a projector in a base, threw an image onto frosted glass and briefly convinced a lot of people that the future of performance was a DJ waving at a pane of Perspex. It became Touch Innovations, the Elite and the XG followed, and then the idea quietly went away again. The Rhythm System mk6 is the latest attempt, and to be fair to it, the engineering is a good deal more honest than what came before.

Start with what it actually is, because the marketing language obscures it. The mk6 is not a controller. It is a 55 inch transparent OLED panel at 1920 x 1080, mounted at a fixed 50 degree angle on a three piece height adjustable stand, connected to your computer by HDMI or DisplayPort with a USB line carrying touch data. It handles video and touch. It handles no audio at all. You still bring the laptop, the interface, the mixer and the sound system. What you are buying is a very large, very heavy, see through monitor that happens to respond when you press it.

The OLED approach solves the two things that made the Emulator awkward. There is no projector, so there is no frosted diffusion layer, no out of focus corners and no image wobbling every time the sub kicks. The glass is 6mm and the stand is built to stop the panel flexing in transit. Transparency runs to roughly 40 per cent when the screen is showing black, which is enough for the audience to see you through it and not much more. In a dark room it looks the part. In daylight, or under a bright marquee, the manufacturer is upfront that it does not.

Now the part that matters and that nobody publishes: latency. There is no figure for touch response anywhere in the specification. The chain here runs digitiser to USB HID to the Windows input stack to your software’s redraw, and every link in that adds milliseconds. For loading tracks, browsing, riding a filter or nudging an EQ, that is almost certainly fine. For anything where your hand needs to arrive at the same instant as the beat, it is an open question, and the vendor’s own advice tells you where the ceiling sits. The suggested technique for the crossfader is not to slide it but to tap it with two fingers at the middle and the ends. That is not a crossfader. That is a series of instructions to a computer that then moves a crossfader for you. There is no resistance, no travel and no edge to find without looking, which is the entire basis of how anyone learned to cut in the first place.

The software picture is similarly narrow. Virtual DJ with the multi touch skin works properly, DJay Pro works out of the box, Rekordbox works with buttons too small to hit reliably, Serato is described as glitchy and without on screen effects, and Mac users get single point touch only because Apple has never supported multi touch on external displays. Traktor and Serato users are pointed towards Pablo Martin’s Chameleon to build a custom interface, which is a sensible workaround but also a second piece of software and another layer between finger and audio.

Then there is the booth. The road case is 99 x 140 x 46 cm and the whole system weighs 94 kg (think of it as 10 record boxes weight). It has casters and it needs a van, a ramp and preferably a second person to lift the panel onto the stand. Very few club booths in Sydney, London or anywhere else have the floor space, the sightlines or the load in to accommodate it, and the 50 degree angle is fixed, so the booth adapts to the screen rather than the other way round. Rhythm System know this and say so plainly: this is not for club DJs, and it is not for anyone who would rather not be looked at.

Which leaves the market it was built for, and the price. The batch sale ran at $8,500 USD delivered, with expedited shipping another 700 on top. For context, the Emulator started around 6,665 USD in 2011, the XG Pro was $6,895 USD and the Elite Pro retailed near $10,000 USD. So the mk6 is not out of step with a category that has always priced itself against the booking fee rather than against the gear. The vendor’s own qualifying criteria are 40 or more paid events a year at $1,500 dollars and up, which is a fair way of saying the maths only works if the screen wins you work you would not otherwise get.

And it might. At a corporate launch or a wedding where the booth is part of the room design, a DJ visible through their own interface is a genuine point of difference, and 1.7 million views on a New Year’s Eve reel is not nothing. Just be clear about what is being bought. This is a staging device. It does not improve the mix, it does not open a technique that was previously unavailable, and it asks you to give up tactile control in exchange for being seen. For the mobile and events market that is a rational trade. For everyone else, it is an expensive answer to a question the dancefloor never asked.

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