Hardware & signal path
Pre-fade listen
Pre-fade listen sends a channel to your headphones before its fader is up, so you hear the next track while the room hears only what is already playing. It is what the cue button on every mixer does.
Measured in our catalog
Only 1,428 of 7,250 transitions DJs build here arrive with tempo, level and key already matched; the rest is what the headphones are for.
Taking every adjacent pair in 717 hand-sequenced flows and asking which of the three checks were already satisfied before anyone touched anything: tempo within 1%, level within a decibel, and a textbook Camelot move. 51.7% pass on tempo, 47.3% on level and 70.5% on key — but only 1,428 pairs (19.7%) pass all three at once, and 740 arrive with none of them settled. Four transitions in five carry work that only becomes audible once the record is cued.
19.7%
Arrive with nothing to fix
51.7%
Tempo already within 1%
47.3%
Level already within a decibel
70.5%
Key already a textbook move
| Checks already passing | Transitions | Share |
|---|---|---|
| All three | 1,428 | 19.7% |
| Two of three | 2,924 | 40.3% |
| One of three | 2,158 | 29.8% |
| None | 740 | 10.2% |
Measured on 11 August 2026 across 7,250 adjacent transitions in flows sequenced by hand on Mixgraph across 717 flows and 515 DJs (machine-generated running orders excluded; both tracks carrying a stored tempo, an analysed level and a key). Settled means tempo within 1%, level within 1 dB, and a same-key, adjacent-key or relative-key move. Method: the full transition dataset and its chance baseline.
Why it matters
Everything a DJ decides in the thirty seconds before a transition happens here. Whether the tempos agree, whether the levels match, whether the keys sit together — all of it is settled in the headphones, against a room that has not heard the incoming record yet.
That is also why the button is on every mixer ever built, including the ones with no effects, no display and no sync. It is the minimum a mixer must do beyond mixing.
Frequently asked
What does PFL stand for?+
Pre-fade listen. The channel is sent to the headphones from a point before the fader, so you hear it at full level regardless of whether the fader is down.
Why is it called pre-fade?+
Because the headphone feed is taken ahead of the channel fader in the signal path. That is the whole trick — the fader controls the room, and the cue is unaffected by it.
What should you listen for when cueing a track?+
Tempo, level and key, in that order — because those are the three that arrive unsettled. Only 19.7% of real transitions need none of them corrected.
Related terms
Cue mix
The cue mix knob sets the balance in your headphones between the cued channel and the master output. Fully one way you hear only the track you are lining up; fully the other, only what the room is hearing.
Split cue
Split cue makes the headphones mono and sends the cued channel to one ear and the master to the other. You lose the stereo image and gain clean separation between the track you are cueing and the one playing.
Booth monitor
The booth monitor is the speaker pointed at the DJ, fed from its own output with its own level control. It is separate from the master, so turning it up changes what you hear and nothing the room hears.
Beatmatching
Beatmatching is lining up two tracks so their beats land together — matching the tempo, then nudging the phase until the kicks coincide. It is the base skill every other mixing technique sits on top of.
Explore: The human transition dataset · Score a transition · Mixing guides · All DJ terms