What did Menura actually build?
Menura Audio is a small Berlin outfit that has spent the last couple of years making outboard gear for DJs: first the MDMX modular mixer, then two analog MDFX boxes, a three-band isolator and a resonant filter. The two new units are digital, and they are the ones the booth has been missing. A Delay and a Reverb, built to sit on a mixer's send and return instead of in a plugin window.
The Delay covers the obvious ground and then some. Echoes lock to tempo from an eighth note out to four bars, there is a tape mode for that saturated 1970s smear, a reverse setting, self-oscillation when you push the feedback, and a quantized feedback pitch so runaway repeats stay in key. The Reverb runs a plate algorithm with a freeze button that holds a tail forever, a BPM-locked tremolo and shimmer, damping, a highpass filter and a lo-fi mode that fakes a grainy 80s box.
Why would a DJ want outboard effects in 2026?
Every club mixer already has a beat-FX section, and every piece of DJ software ships with delay and reverb, so the question is fair. Menura's answer is feel and recording. Both units run at 96kHz and 32-bit float, they store 20 presets you recall over MIDI, and each one has a class-compliant USB audio interface built in, so you can record the wet or the dry signal straight into a laptop. Founder Jasper Lauter frames it as a live-first tool that doubles as studio gear: "We built the MDFX for DJs who want studio-quality effects under their hands," he says, "but full MIDI makes them just as capable in the studio."
The pitch is not a new effect. It is putting your hands back on the effect.
The hardware is deliberately mixer-agnostic. The boxes are metal, magnetic so they clamp together and stay put, powered over USB-C with daisy-chaining, and they sync three ways: tap tempo, automatic BPM detection or MIDI clock. Drop them on the send of a Pioneer, an Allen and Heath or Menura's own mixer and they behave the same.
What is the catch?
It is a crowdfunder, with everything that implies. The campaign opened on 2 July 2026 and runs to 1 August, with a super early bird at 340 euros a unit and deliveries promised later. Menura says it was already closing on its funding goal on the first day, and it has put a browser demo of the DSP online so you can judge the sound before committing a cent, which is more honesty than most gear launches offer. Still, 340 euros a box is real money for an effect your mixer arguably already does, and a crowdfunder is a promise, not a product on a shelf. If the tactile, recordable angle speaks to you, this is one of the more thought-through DJ tools to show up in a while.
