It’s a 12 x 12 FireWire audio interface. It’s a customizable mixer, with curves, filter styles, and ranges editable via a color LCD screen. It’s a MIDI controller. It’s an Italian sports car, molded by design house Giugiaro Italdesign. And it has password-protected audio output limiting, so those sleazeball DJs don’t blow your club’s speakers. (No, seriously. They need a password to defeat the limiter.) Hell, like you’re going to let anyone but you get their grimy hands on this. We’ve been watching the Ecler hardware, and its needlessly-overblown pre-launch hype. Now we can enjoy the hardware itself. And it is awful purty, even if you actually don’t need / can’t afford it. -PK

Ecler has officially launched the EVO5 DJ mixer + audio interface + effects unit at Messe, though you’ll have to wait until October to get your hands on one. Its yet-to-be-determined price will be in the range of $1500-$2000. Full details on this 5-channel digital DJ mixer can be found at Ecler’s new EVO product mini-site.

Here’s the quick rundown on the specs, if you’re not still distracted by the looks:

It’s got 24/96 converters and a 2-port FireWire sound card that supports 6 stereo inputs and 6 stereo outputs. Route any of these channels to your computer and back for effects processing, mixing tracks from your DAW of choice, or recording to computer, etc.

Eight editable effects can sync to MIDI or the built-in beat counter (which can output MIDI Clock): Delay/Echo, Filter, Flanger, Phaser, Transformer, Panoramic, Pitch and Reverb. You can chain two effects together and also save presets to your computer via FireWire with the included EVO5 software. There are also two editable effects just for microphone: a Noise Gate and Compressor.

10 push switches and 4 rotary encoders can be mapped to MIDI. 64 layouts include ones for Native Insturments Traktor and Ableton Live. As expected in a digital mixer, you can customize settings for EQ and fader curves. There is also an output limiter to help save speakers from impassioned DJs.

The user interface, designed by Giugiaro, features a 320 x 240 TFT color screen with 262,144 colors. Thanks to an anodized technique, the lettering and markings on the black aluminum faceplate will not fade before Ecler delivers another revolutionary DJ mixer.