How I'm Building a Tube DJ Mixer

I've been doing web development for twenty years. But alongside that — just as long — electronics: microcontrollers, DIY projects, soldering. This isn't a new hobby; it's been with me the whole time. I even have a separate article on this site about a GPS tracker I built from scratch.

Since childhood I've been into music: clubs, DJing, collecting records, playing vinyl. I'm an audiophile — but with a scientific approach, no mysticism.

A few years ago I got a tube phono stage built around Vasilyich's circuit. And since then I can't get rid of the sound — in the best sense. Clean, transparent, beautiful. And in DJ mixers it always sounded worse to me, subjectively. I always wanted a mixer with the same kind of tube phono stages and the same quality of sound.

Nothing like that exists on the market. The only tube DJ mixer I've come across uses the tubes for some unclear purpose — apparently just to add harmonics to the output and "warm" the sound. Which effectively means moving it further from the source. That's not my approach.

So I spent a long time thinking about it, and then finally decided: I'll build my own mixer and start my own company. That's how TENSA came about — a vacuum tube DJ mixer, handbuilt in Valencia.

I've been working on this for nearly a year. The prototype is done, the first pre-production batch is being prepared. The core circuit is based on the Pioneer DJM-500 — a classic, proven design with solid EQ that introduces no distortion when the EQ knobs are at zero. External linear power supply without stabilisation, for maximum sound quality. Custom transformer. Top-tier components.

I'm doing this almost entirely on my own — right now only friends are helping. But the process is moving, and moving well.

TENSA is a boutique tube DJ mixer, handbuilt in Valencia. Everything about it lives at tensa.cc.