It's not exactly fair to put the S2 up against its peers. If you're a heavy user of the Sample Deck, you won't buy the S2. There's no way to control the volume of individual samples from the controller but they can be assigned to effects section one or two. It'll remain muted until you press the corresponding Cue button, one through four. Under the new Sample rotary press A or B depending on which deck you want to load to, then load a loop from the track playing or a one-shot from the Browser. Loading a sample is now a little trickier. The most blatant omission from the S2 is the Sample Deck control. Plus, there's now no way to switch between Group and Advanced effects from the controller. We also wish NI had added EQ kill to this model, as it's been a consistent user request. There's nothing elegant about this and adding a shift-function to the gain knob could be dangerous, but don't forget you can sacrifice an effect slot for a filter too. Now, holding Shift turns the Gain knob into a filter control and because it's a push-able rotary, it now has an on/off switch. This might seem like a big issue, but we've always had a gripe as it never had an on/off button so resetting it to 'zero' in time for the drop was never perfect. What's also missing is the one-knob filter. On top, the charming seven-segment LED has left us and loading is now done via the buttons under the endless rotary and, thankfully, pushing the Browse button now expands to Browser view. The footswitch input and physical MIDI I/O have also left us, but there is a MIDI mode for non-Traktor control use.

Ni traktor kontrol s2