Ongoing History Daily: The first DJ mixer

DJs have been mixing together records since at least the 1920s but this was mostly restricted to radio stations which had the required equipment. When live DJs started spinning records at parties and clubs, they just simply put records on a single turntable. Then things got a little more sophisticated with some DJs going back and forth between a couple of record players. There had to be a better way, right?

This brings us to a guy named Alex Rosner. In 1971, he designed the first DJ mixer for a venue called the Haven Club. It wasn’t fancy. There were inputs for two turntables and a microphone plus an output jack for headphones. But for the first time, DJs were able to mix and fade songs from one turntable to another while also talking over the music.

Props then to Alex Rosner for helping to make modern DJing possible.