The Tonium Pacemaker is one of those bits of kit that makes you wonder what might have been. Launched in 2008, it was a proper pocket-sized DJ system that packed twin decks, a mixer, and effects into something smaller than a paperback. It sold around 100,000 units, won a few awards, got decent coverage in the tech press, and then sort of drifted off into obscurity. Not because it was badly made or didn’t work, but mostly because it arrived right when the iPhone was starting to reshape what we expected from portable gadgets.
Swedish inventor Jonas Norberg showed off the Pacemaker at Sonar Festival in Barcelona in 2007, riding the wave of Scandinavian influence that was washing over dance music at the time. Swedish House Mafia were everywhere, Spotify was taking off, and there seemed to be genuine momentum behind the idea that people wanted more than just passive listening. The pitch was straightforward: professional mixing capabilities that actually fit in your pocket. You could theoretically knock out mixes on the tube, in a café, wherever. It sounded good on paper, anyway.
I had a half day play with one back in 2008, and I’ll be honest, I couldn’t really see the point. A tool? A toy? Somewhere in between, probably. It was clever, sure, but I walked away wondering who it was actually for. That said, plenty of people swore by the thing, and still do. Each to their own, I suppose.
The device itself was an impressive piece of kit, whatever you made of its purpose. Available in both 60GB and 120GB configurations, the Pacemaker packed the equivalent of twin DJ decks, a full mixer, and a healthy effects rack into a unit measuring 164mm by 69.6mm by 22.8mm and weighing just 200 grams. That’s lighter than most smartphones today but significantly more substantial in ambition. The matt-rubber casing gave it a premium feel, whilst the 1.7-inch circular TFT display with 262,000 colours provided visual feedback that was genuinely useful rather than merely decorative. It supported all the file formats you’d expect: MP3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, and Ogg Vorbis, meaning you could load it up with high-quality audio without compromise.
What made the Pacemaker genuinely interesting was how it approached the fundamental challenge of portable DJing. Rather than trying to miniaturise turntables or CDJs, Norberg and his team reimagined the interface entirely around touch control. The device featured a circular touchpad that became your primary means of interaction, with gestures controlling everything from EQ adjustments to effect parameters. Swipe upwards from the centre to adjust treble, move right for mids, downwards for bass. Hold the shift button and those same gestures triggered reverb, echo, filter, and roll effects. It was intuitive once you got the hang of it, though there was definitely a learning curve that separated casual tinkerers from dedicated users.
The feature set was genuinely comprehensive. You had two independent audio channels with full crossfader control, three-band EQ for each deck, cue points, looping capabilities, and a selection of time-stretching and pitch-bending options. The auto-beatmatching function analysed your tracks and helped sync them with a single button press, though most serious users found manual beatmatching straightforward enough given the visual beat graphs displayed on screen. One particularly clever touch was how the device would warn you if you were about to play both decks through the line-out simultaneously when you’d forgotten to push the crossfader all the way across. It’s the sort of thoughtful detail that suggested the designers had actually spent time behind the decks rather than just theorising about what DJs might need.
Battery life was respectable, offering up to 18 hours of standard playback or around five hours of active mixing on a full charge. The separate 3.5mm line-out and headphone outputs meant you could properly cue up your next track whilst the current one played through the main output, exactly as you would with a traditional setup. The signal-to-noise ratio of 103dB was genuinely professional-grade, and multiple impedance settings for the headphone output showed attention to detail that audiophiles would appreciate. This wasn’t a toy pretending to be professional equipment; it was genuinely capable kit that happened to fit in your jacket pocket.
The Pacemaker Editor software, which came bundled with the device, extended the functionality considerably. You could use it to organise your music library, with automatic BPM analysis and waveform generation for every track. Mixes created on the device could be transferred to your computer for further refinement, or you could build mixes from scratch in the editor and send them to the Pacemaker. The software also facilitated uploading your mixes to Tonium’s online community, creating a social dimension around the device that felt ahead of its time. This was 2008, remember, when the concept of a dedicated platform for sharing DJ mixes wasn’t quite as commonplace as it would become.
So why did it fail? Well, ‘fail’ might be too harsh a word for something that sold 100,000 units and won the DJ Mag Tech Award for Most Innovative New DJ Product in 2008. But by 2010, Tonium had discontinued the hardware line, and that tells you everything you need to know about how quickly the landscape shifted. As Norberg himself admitted, the Pacemaker arrived just as the world was transitioning to an iPhone-centric reality. Suddenly, the idea of carrying a dedicated device for DJing felt quaint when your phone could theoretically do the same thing via an app. The economics shifted too; developing and manufacturing bespoke hardware made increasingly less sense when software could reach a vastly larger audience at a fraction of the development cost.
There were practical limitations as well. The device featured only one jogwheel, which made traditional scratch-style mixing genuinely difficult. This wasn’t immediately obvious from the specifications but became apparent once you tried to use it for anything beyond basic mixing. The touchpad interface, whilst innovative, never quite matched the tactile satisfaction of physical faders and knobs. You could learn to work within its constraints, certainly, and many users became genuinely proficient, but it required adaptation rather than building on muscle memory developed with traditional equipment. The price point didn’t help either. At $499 for the 60GB model and $699 for the 120GB version, it occupied an awkward middle ground: too expensive to be an impulse purchase or a toy, but not quite professional enough to justify the investment for working DJs who already had established setups.
Perhaps the most significant issue was philosophical rather than technical. The Pacemaker presumed that people wanted to DJ anywhere and everywhere, but most people who wanted to DJ seriously already had their setups at home or in the club. The portability, whilst impressive, solved a problem that wasn’t necessarily widespread. Yes, you could practice on the bus or throw together a quick mix during your lunch break, but how many people were genuinely clamouring for that capability? The device found its audience amongst hobbyists, gadget enthusiasts, and a core group of dedicated users who appreciated its uniqueness, but it never quite broke through to mainstream adoption.
The physical Pacemaker’s story doesn’t end with its discontinuation, though. A decade on from its release, units were still being manufactured by the same Korean factory, with dedicated users paying upwards of $500 on the second-hand market to get their hands on one. The community around the device remained active, with Tonium even releasing new firmware updates years after officially discontinuing the product line. There’s something genuinely touching about that level of dedication, a group of enthusiasts keeping alive a piece of technology that the broader market had moved past.
Tonium pivoted to software, initially developing apps for the BlackBerry Playbook before eventually creating a Pacemaker app for iOS and Android. The app found significantly more success than the hardware, offering Spotify integration and even an AI DJ assistant that could help select and mix tracks automatically. It’s telling that the software version succeeded where the hardware stumbled, validating the core concept whilst acknowledging the reality that dedicated devices were becoming an increasingly tough sell in the smartphone era.
Looking back at the Pacemaker now, it feels like a glimpse of a future that never quite materialised. The device represented a genuine attempt to rethink DJing for a mobile-first world, to distil the essence of club culture into something genuinely portable without compromising on functionality. It had vision, ambition, and genuine innovation behind it. The execution was largely solid, the feature set comprehensive, and the user experience thoughtfully designed. In many ways, it was exactly what it promised to be: the world’s first truly portable professional DJ system.
The fact that it didn’t become ubiquitous doesn’t diminish what it achieved or what it represented. It pushed the boundaries of what portable music technology could do at a time when the iPhone was still finding its feet and apps were far from the sophisticated tools they’ve become. It inspired conversations about the future of DJing, prompted other manufacturers to think differently about portability and interface design, and gave a dedicated community of users something genuinely special to rally around.
There’s an argument to be made that the Pacemaker was never meant to replace traditional DJ setups but rather to complement them, to offer an alternative approach for specific scenarios and use cases. In that sense, perhaps it succeeded more than its commercial fate might suggest. It proved that innovative hardware could still find an audience even as software began its inexorable rise to dominance. It demonstrated that there was genuine appetite for reimagining how we interact with music technology, even if the broader market wasn’t quite ready to embrace that particular vision at that particular moment.
The story of the Pacemaker is ultimately a reminder that timing in technology is everything. You can have a brilliant product, executed well, at a price point that’s not unreasonable, and still find yourself overtaken by broader market shifts that you couldn’t have predicted. The iPhone didn’t just change how we thought about phones; it fundamentally altered expectations around what a portable device should do, how much it should cost, and whether dedicated single-purpose gadgets made sense anymore. The Pacemaker was caught in that transition, a beautifully designed answer to a question that was rapidly becoming obsolete.
For those who owned one, used one, or simply appreciated what it tried to do, the Pacemaker remains a fascinating piece of music technology history. It’s a reminder that sometimes the most interesting innovations aren’t the ones that achieve mainstream success but rather the ones that push boundaries, challenge assumptions, and show what’s possible when you’re willing to think differently about established conventions. In a market increasingly dominated by software and general-purpose devices, there was something wonderfully audacious about creating a bespoke piece of hardware dedicated solely to the art of DJing. That it didn’t conquer the world doesn’t make it any less remarkable for having tried.
The Pacemaker proved that you could fit professional DJ capabilities into your pocket. It just couldn’t overcome the inconvenient truth that soon everyone would be carrying something in their pocket capable of running sophisticated DJ software at a fraction of the cost. History is full of brilliant ideas that arrived at precisely the wrong moment, and the Tonium Pacemaker deserves to be remembered as one of the more intriguing examples.
Related
Discover more from Decoded Magazine
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
