A Münster brand with roots in the city’s club scene.

Reloop is a German brand of DJ equipment based in Münster, in North Rhine-Westphalia. The legal notice on its website names the company behind it as Global Distribution GmbH & Co. KG, registered in Münster, and calls it the “World Headquarter” of “Reloop – Solutions for DJs.” The same notice lists Gerald Barbyer and Thomas Heselhaus as managing directors, and the company’s about page calls Barbyer its chief executive.

The company’s own account of its start is short. Its homepage says Reloop was founded in 1996 “by a young group of music technology experts.” An archived 2014 version of the site added that it began “as a garage business” and had always been “a brand by DJs for DJs as opposed to other DJ equipment manufacturers who originated from the fields of hifi, audio or software.” Neither names the founders, and we found no independent record that does, so the founding date here rests on the company’s word.

The Münster club scene gives some context. German Wikipedia’s article on the Münster DJ Steve Stix says that the early-1990s free-party magazine Sp(!)ace News was run by the founders of the city’s Cosmic Club and of the Elevator DJ store / Reloop. Archived copies of reloop.de from 2002 and 2003 show the brand trading under the line “reloop – solution for deejays,” in German, English and French, with a menu link to Elevator. The catalogue already covered a whole DJ booth: RP-1000, RP-2000 and RP-4000 turntables in MK III versions, RMX mixers, headphones, microphones, CD players and record cases.

From battle mixers to a hybrid turntable.

Reloop’s range has always been broad. The 2014 site listed DJ controllers, audio interfaces, CD and MP3 players, turntables, mixers, headphones, studio keyboards and monitors, microphones, cartridges, PA systems, amplifiers and cases. Its current about page says much of its “main assortment” consists of “sturdy mixers and turntable weapons ready for the battle,” and that vinyl “continues to play an essential role” in its thinking.

The product that drew the most attention was the RP-8000. Reloop announced it at the BPM Show in Birmingham in September 2013, together with the Beatpad, a controller for Algoriddim’s djay 2 app on the iPad, and the Keypad, a production controller, DJ TechTools reported, giving the deck’s price as €599. The RP-8000 put MIDI controls on a direct-drive turntable: eight backlit pads, an encoder and cue, loop, sampler and slicer modes for Serato software, with a USB link for up to four decks. The site called it “one of the bolder advances in turntable tech we’ve seen in a number of years.”

Reviewing it in May 2014 at $799, DJ TechTools wrote that “the DJ turntable market has seen very little excitement in recent years” and that with the RP-8000 “Reloop has set foot in new territory altogether,” while noting quirks such as its power switch. Reloop itself calls it “the first turntable to fuse classic DJing with performance enhancing digital control.” At the NAMM show in January 2015 the company added the RP-8000 Straight, a version with a straight tonearm, and the RMX-60, a four-channel mixer, DJ TechTools reported.

Design and documentation.

Two groups dominate DJ equipment. Pioneer DJ left Pioneer Corporation in 2014; its parent, AlphaTheta, has been owned since 2020 by the Japanese holding company Noritsu, according to English Wikipedia. inMusic Brands, of Cumberland, Rhode Island, owns Numark, Denon DJ and Rane, which it bought in 2016.

The makers here work around that pair. Reloop is a brand of Global Distribution GmbH & Co. KG of Münster, Germany, its imprint says. Ecler was founded in Barcelona in 1965 and, by its own account, was acquired by the Fordahl Capital group in 2014; it labels its products “Made in Barcelona.” Mixars calls itself an independent subsidiary of Italy’s RCF Group, run from Valsamoggia, near Bologna.

Two are older names that stopped. Rodec, of Belgium, says its production paused in 2014 and that it returned in 2022 under Tom De Ridder, its chief executive since 2021; its website names TDR Media BV of Leuven. Vestax, the Tokyo company founded by Hidesato Shiino in 1977, entered bankruptcy proceedings in December 2014, Teikoku Databank reported.

One has joined a giant. Stanton, the American phono-cartridge name built up by Walter Stanton, passed to Gibson in 2011 and to inMusic in 2020, according to English Wikipedia; its website now calls it part of “the inMusic family of brands.”

Algoriddim, the Munich maker of the djay app, makes software, not hardware; it says partners including Reloop and Pioneer DJ build controllers for it.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed in Germany, assembled in Asia.

On manufacturing, Reloop is direct. Its about page says its products “are exclusively developed and designed in Germany and then assembled by selected Asian production partners,” and that its research and development is “closely connected to the DJ scene.” The 2014 site said its sound engineers “always work closely with our selected Asian production facilities.” Independent coverage fits that picture: DJ TechTools wrote in 2014 that the RP-8000 shares its basic design with the “Super OEM” direct-drive turntable produced by the contract maker Hanpin, putting the premium for the extra controls at around $200 a deck over a regular Super OEM model, and English Wikipedia counts the RP-7000 and RP-8000 among the Hanpin-built descendants of Numark’s Pro TT turntables. Shared platforms are common in the DJ trade, where several brands sell decks on the same base and differ in tonearms, controls and finish.

Reloop works closely with other brands. Its about page lists partners including the Danish cartridge maker Ortofon, Serato, Algoriddim’s djay, VirtualDJ, Ableton and the German DJ-furniture brand Glorious. It also supports DJ schools, among them, it says, the Leicester-Shire Schools Music Service in England, equipped with 32 RP-8000 turntables and 16 RMX-22i mixers. Its homepage features the turntablists DJ Angelo and DJ QBert and the Dutch DJ Laidback Luke among its artists, and products such as the Mixtour Pro controller and the Spin portable turntable.

We found no design awards we could confirm for Reloop, and no published description of its logo, typeface or colours. Its wording has shifted over the years: “solution for deejays” on the 2002 site, “Shape your Performance” in 2014, and “Solutions for DJs” today.

For a design guide, Reloop shows how a DJ brand can build its identity on the scene it came from rather than on a factory of its own. Compare Technics, whose SL-1200 set the shape most DJ turntables still follow, and Serato, the software the RP-8000 was built to control. For this guide we use deck black, graphite, platter silver and a cue orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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