(FORTUNE Magazine) – Since today's DJs can make into the six figures, perhaps ditching Intro to Marketing in order to spin music isn't such a bad career choice. The latest in DJ technology, Pioneer's CDJ-1000 ($1,300) is the digital answer to the traditional turntable. You can get the same hip-hop scratching effect from CDs that, up to now, has been limited to vinyl. Press the jog dial, and the music stops; turn the dial in either direction, and you get that "wicky-wicky" sound. The CDJ-1000 has a memory card slot that allows you to save cue and loop points; you can even use the player to burn CD-Rs and CD-RWs. A Wave Display reads each track on the CD and shows sound levels graphically. Old-school vinyl diehards may resist the lure of digital technology, but arriving at your first frat-party gig without a weighty crate of records definitely has its advantages. Best of all, there's a switch that allows for playing a disk backward. Finally, a way to decode those subliminal 'NSync messages.

--Mark Borden