Christmas, with Christmas comes children's Christmas wish lists, with that, endless hours spent searching shops for something which you've never heard of but apparently have seen endless advertisements on the television for. This year all my youngest sons wish list said was CD Mixer Turntable or DJ Equipment. I was quite surprised at this, but knowing how much time he had recently spent using a computer programme to create dance tracks I thought it would be a great idea. My only reservations were I thought that DJ Equipment would be expensive and I didn't want to spend vast amounts of money on one present not knowing whether or not this would be a phrase he was going through or whether in the next few years we would become over-run with speakers, turntables and countless items of DJ Equipment taking over our home.

Now came the search for a suitable CD mixer turntable which would be easy to use, look the part and create a big enough sound for my son to feel the real deal without spending my entire Christmas budget. I'm not technical at all, have never been into the clubbing scene and wouldn't know a Pioneer from a Numark, so it was time to do some research.

I was imagining something which would resemble the old style disco equipment, large, bulky, didn't sound very good, like the old style mobile DJ's you get at parties and I wasn't even sure that you could get a turntable which mixed CD's? So with absolutely no knowledge on the subject I turned to the internet. When I typed in the search for DJ Equipment it returned thousands of results! I further refined my search to CD Mixer Turntable, to my surprise I found what I was looking for, except there were so many different models to choose from.

I really wanted to get the best I could for my money, but bearing in mind this present was for an absolute beginner. who by the end of Christmas day would either be bored to tears with it or have turned into a Pete Tong wannabe. I spoke to several people about my quest and they recommended going to DJ Equipment shop rather than scouring the internet. So I searched for shops in the local area, bingo! I found two.

I am so glad I did this, given my lack of knowledge on the subject. The staff didn't look at me as though I was from another planet, instead after asking me some questions regarding my sons experience, age, capability they were able to advise me of the perfect present, not only this I had a full demonstration, it was just the job, and because it was an ex-display model still with complete original packaging it was just a fraction of the original price!

I was so pleased with my purchase I proceeded to buy some very nice speakers, headphones, microphone and jack plugs. No need to say in the end I stretched the budget a little but in turn my boy was going to be so impressed with his DJ Equipment on Christmas day. Sure enough his present was a hit; Christmas day was a truly musical event with sounds that would rival some of the top DJ's.

He is always looking out for new bits of kit to add to his expanding collection and has now extended it to include disco lights and a smoke machine, which is brilliant for family parties and special occasions with him as the budding DJ.

All of the equipment he has bought has been either ex-display, repackaged, B-stock or second hand, which has kept the prices low, whilst the quality of the product remains high and from leading brand names too, this keeps being a DJ an affordable hobby for the time being, who knows today our lounge, tomorrow Ibiza!