"Why is it so expensive?" - commentary from someone who does this for a living at Sequential
Small Volume - each unit is more expensive than a large volume product, you don't get price breaks on any components or tooling costs
Design focused - Who is the product for? It isn't for people who want to spend 250$ on a Behringer mixer. It is for people who want something that is high quality and doesn't break. Reliable. For people that rely on their tools to be creative or appreciate design. You are paying a premium. See Apple for lots of examples. This is also one of the biggest strengths of the company, if you want something cheap you're looking in the wrong place.
Complex - the amount of balance of various components here adds a lot to the design and development costs. Battery is an unusual feature but puts it in a different product category. Balancing that with the audio quality and reliability is not a trivial problem. Add in wireless, audio drivers (not trivial at ALL), Complexity increases development time and adds risk to the long term stability of the product, that is added into the cost.
Most of the small features feel like somebody there thought it would be fun and/or easy to put in. It's a good way to iterate through design ideas, you have to see it in reality. That type of prototyping isn't easy. Most people don't use 90% of the features but when you are in a creative industry the 1% that does absolutely LOVES it and uses it in ways you never expected. It's difficult to balance the amount of development you put into fun things vs. business cases.
If you are trying to figure out why you'd pay for this you aren't their target market. It's far more interesting (to me) to think about why some people WOULD pay for this and what a market looks like that you are not a part of
I’m part of a team that makes low volume high priced electronics. Component costs don’t contribute that much: the price difference between qty 1 and qty 1k is usually much larger than between qty 1k and anything more. The things I see contributing to the cost of low quantity hardware are:
1. The need to amortize development costs over fewer units. This is not just software and hardware engineers, but office space, lab equipment, mechanical engineering for enclosures, prototype builds, emissions and compliance testing (FCC, CE, UL, TÜV, depending device and on target market)
2. Higher manufacturing costs. Low cost overseas manufacturing has fairly high fixed costs, especially if you want to maintain high quality.
Component cost increases due to the pandemic and supply chain issues easily increased the price by 25-30% in our industry due to several factors outside of the norm, like some single source parts most companies relied on with factory problems, fires, etc
In my experience over the past 6-12 months this is significant
Oh component costs have gone up for sure the last year or so. But I'm saying the per-unit component costs wouldn't be that different between making 1,000 per year or 10,000 per month. [1]
[1]: Except that in the current supply chain environment, it would change the "should we pay scalper prices for that component or should we spend the fixed costs to redesign with a different, more available component" calculus.
As above, not only do I do this for a living but in the specific sub-industry this product is made for, which means in this particular case I know quite a bit. Very seldom do I think I know better but in this case I have industry specific knowledge
Yamaha, Mackie, Allen & Heath, Soundcraft, and ART all make mixers with at least 6 channels on them in the $250 price range. So, there's more to the mixer landscape than Teenage Eng. and Behringer.
I can't comment on all the brands, but I've used Yamaha and Mackie for years, with virtually zero problems. My old Yamaha 12 channel (which would retail for $300 today) was an absolute tank. It did countless shows in dirty warehouses, clubs, fields, and never even had a road case! Which, I I'd qualify as pretty reliable.
> If you are trying to figure out why you'd pay for this you aren't their target market
I actually think that I am their target market. I've got many thousands of dollars worth of eurorack modular (which is the same niche), synthesizers (including Sequential), guitars, and studio equipment. I obsess over this stuff, and spend money on it.
But, I cannot figure out why I would spend $1200 on this 6 channel mixer. The Burr Brown ADC? I guess you could argue the size is the selling point. But, that seems more like a solution looking for a problem. And, frankly, if you intend to use a mixer in your performance, the size could do more harm than good.
I'm not sure what the target market is either, but I suspect people who highly value portability would be a large part of it. This thing packs a lot of features in a really tiny form factor (potentially replacing bigger mixers and an FX pedal, dunno if the sequencer/synth is worth anything), and has a battery. If you have a lot of studio equipment including eurorack, big keyboard synths and other gear I suspect you wouldn't quite fit that description, this thing would get lost in the studio.
I doubt this will see much backstage use. I expect to see it used by buskers, who need portability (and sometimes the ability to pack up in seconds), and by artists who make fiddling with their equipment part of their performance. That and people who put it on their desk because they like the design.
Can get behind the rest of your comment but I don't think anyone's ever accused TE of making durable products. To their credit though, they replaced my broken PO without a fuss, so I'm not a detractor.
I have used TE products on occasion and looked into them deeply from a bunch of engineering perspectives. Compared to other products in a similar price point and form factor the likelihood of a problem is far lower. When you reduce the size you eliminate structural components and if you can't mill aluminum you're left with a lot of difficult choices to make to keep things stable. TE does a good job of balancing those things.
Customer service is where you see the end result of this. Replacing things quickly and easily means they aren't struggling to support bad design decisions in terms of stability.
Another data point, I own OP-1 and I find it of low durability, especially for the price. E.g. its knobs, buttons and jacks seem delicate compared to other gear in similar price range.
this has not been my experience with several TE products.
My experience suggests that TE charges a lot because they 1) they're a status symbol so they can and 2) they replace a lot of devices.
TE to me does not at all signify high quality or 'good build quality'. Just 'ok' and 'it will likely fail long before its purchase price justifies itself'.
They're the pre-intel apple of the synth world - overpriced and not worth the cost, but status symbols for those who want them.
There is an entire aftermarket for OP-1 USB and audio I/O boards because they fail so often, both physically and electronically, and somewhat the same for the buttons and knobs.
But yes, the milled aluminum is solid.
I still love the OP-1 though. Nothing quite like it.
OP-Z - bends straight out of the box and causes double trigs, keyboard is plastic welded so can't be repaired outside of depot. custom battery only so once TE stops supporting it this thing is dead.
OP-1 - commonly has power switch issues, as well as other quirks that are harder to nail down, as well as keyboard issues.
Teenage engineering support is extremely slow sometimes taking a week+ to reply to support issues. I've heard of people not getting responses at all.
Their high end stuff is just expensive - the high price tag doesn't mean high quality.
I say all this as an op-z owner and former owner of multiple pocket operators who wishes it was a better device than it is. It isn't. I wouldn't pay them $1200 for anything.
TE is a trademark of Tyco Electronics, a very popular connector and electrical device supplier (audio included), and could be a confusing acronym to use for Teenage Engineering.
Looking at all the features it has in this form factor, plus the supply shortage, I can see why it costs as much as it does. Does it mean it's a good deal? Well maybe, if you want most/all of the features, value portability in terms of form factory plus battery, and like the aesthetics. If this thing ticks a few too many boxes, some alternatives:
- A portable (no battery) 6-stereo/12-mono channel mixer with FX, but no bluetooth or USB-audio interface: 1010bluebox, I have one and it's nice. About $500-600
- A portable battery-powered, 5-mono channel: bastl dude, about $200
- A portable battery-powered 2-mono channel dj mixer: raiden rpm-100, about $200
- A portable battery-powered or usb-powered mixer from unknown brands with possibly questionable audio quality: lots of choices on alibaba and even amazon, for as low as $15. I use a 6-stereo-channel usb-powered moukey on my office desk that cost $25 and is adequate for day-to-day usage but clips easily
- Less portable but still small traditional mixers with ~4 inputs: lots of choices from mackie, behringer, yamaha, etc in the $50-200 range
- Also: passive mixers that pretty much just sum the signals, can be found for cheap ($20 or less), but you'll usually need to connect them to something that will amplify the output
> Reliable. It is for people who want something that is high quality and doesn't break.
My TE OP-1 synth has not really matched these adjectives.
One of the keyboard keys is misconstructed, so it’s on a hair trigger. The lightest brush will cause it to get set off. I have to replace the keyboard at some point to fix it. This should have been caught in QC.
It also undergoes fairly frequent software crashes (esp. for a musical instrument). I’ve crashed it at least 3 times doing random UI interactions.
Given that this is one of their flagship products, and a lot of people use adjectives like “reliable” and “quality” to describe it, I’m very skeptical that these descriptions are actually accurate when applied to other TE products.
Small companies don't have the same QC that a large corporation does, you'll never get the same consistency across products at the early stages of a company. Unfair to compare against that.
You should definitely contact support and let them know, my guess is they'll take care of the keyboard. Could be debris inside it somewhere, could be a number of other tolerance issues or something else.
Crashes are definitely a problem. Knowing the chip they use and the complexity under the hood. The fact is though, all instruments suffer from issues like this. You will not find a single piece of gear on the market that doesn't have bugs. Crash issues are rare in our gear only because they are more simple by comparison. When I was writing the Tempest OS I had tons of crash bugs I had to work through because it was ambitious and quite complex, nearly all of which got fixed as the OS matured. Same with the OP-1 I'd imagine.
Professional musicians learn to work around things and create systems to deal with inevitable problems. It's just the reality of the game.
> Crashes are definitely a problem. Knowing the chip they use and the complexity under the hood. The fact is though, all instruments suffer from issues like this. You will not find a single piece of gear on the market that doesn't have bugs. Crash issues are rare in our gear only because they are more simple by comparison. When I was writing the Tempest OS I had tons of crash bugs I had to work through because it was ambitious and quite complex, nearly all of which got fixed as the OS matured. Same with the OP-1 I'd imagine.
It’s been on the market for TEN YEARS. They have had plenty of time to defuckulate the software.
Nearly every complex instrument still has critical bugs after 10 years because development moves on after 4-5 years. Hardware bugs are != software bugs in terms of complexity because the debugging and tools you have available are simply not even close to comparable. This is why you don't get a whole lot of complex instruments from small companies. I applaud anyone who gives it a shot, it isn't easy.
I appreciate your obvious experience in this area, however synthesisers with more features, and more complicated user interfaces than the OP-1 have existed longer than I've been alive. I know this is not from a small company, but take for instance Yamaha's SY77 from 1989. It's built around a 16-bit Hitachi H8/500 processor, with 1MB of SRAM. It's CPU, synth engine, and peripherals are all glued together with 7400-series logic chips. Its AFM/AWM engine, sequencer, and the UI that controls them hold up well by today's standards. Compared to whatever ARM SoC the OP-1 is built around, the EE involved in designing the SY77 is much more complex. There is no comparison between the tooling available to Yamaha in the 80s, and the open-source tooling/libraries/resources available for embedded development in 2022. I understand economies of scale, however can't we expect more from a company like Teenage Engineering for the huge prices for their gear?
My TG77 is 33 years old. I replaced some aging capacitors because they were making the main output a bit noisy, however aside from that it's worked very well.
Comparing TE with Yamaha is a pretty massive difference in size of engineering teams and overall engineering knowledge. In the 80s the products, while definitely complex, had some advantages: back then you could get very simple and precise parts from many manufacturers because you had more small chip foundries available. seriously, try and find options for some of the bread and butter chips and you go crazy. The industry has consolidated most functionality into complex SoC parts which increase the bugs. The OP-1 is all run on an ADI Blackfin and even ADI was quite impressed by how much they got running. The graphics, the peripherals, the audio, everything. I was quite impressed!
You’d think that the tools got better but… honestly? Not really. The complexity of the chips has grown dramatically faster than the ability of the tools to simplify development. I can give tons and tons of examples of this in this particular industry, even with that exact chip. You pay for cheap chips in development and engineering hours
Battery or mobile products are no joke. Small products are no joke. Not only do you have to optimize around cost/performance but also around power considerations. Each major variable you add to development isn’t additive, it isn’t even multiplicative. It’s very difficult to compare apples to oranges here
Then you have overall price… the TG77 would have been roughly 2700$ adjusting for inflation (from 300,000 yen in 1989)
What comparable products do we have in that price range? Those are better comparisons
Just some thoughts. There’s no one right answer to this but if you think you can make a better product for the cost there might just be a business opportunity there!
> You’d think that the tools got better but… honestly? Not really...
Really? Aren't debugging interfaces light years ahead of where they were in the 80s? Yamaha's entire DX/SY line predate JTAG. There was no GDB back when Yamaha made the DX7. Parallel interfaces were probably theoretically simpler to debug than modern protocols like i2c and whatnot are today, I admit. And sure, the DX7's 16kb ROM is much smaller in scope than what is in the OP-1.
All these synthesisers perform the actual tone generation on proprietary LSI chips. You'll have a hard time convincing me that ADI's tooling is more difficult to use than whatever EDI tooling was available to Yamaha in 1982. The stakes aren't quite as high in modern software either. If they made an unforeseen design error in the LSI chip, that's game over.
> Battery or mobile products are no joke...
I don't doubt that. No doubt a battery requires a lot of complex design considerations. I'm sure balancing charge, size, and cost is difficult when it comes to batteries. How does this complexity compare to a synth like the SY77 using mains power? It steps that down to 5V, and 12V rails. I can't find the OP-1 schematics right now, I'm guessing it uses a single 5V rail from USB in.
> Then you have overall price...
This is true. I'm more talking about the complexity of its design. I picked the SY77 because it's closer in terms of the amount of features.
> There’s no one right answer to this but...
I don't doubt for a second that Teenage Engineering have some very bright people working there, and that they do great engineering.
That's where open sourcing it might come in handy. Oh, and don't worry about 'hobbyists' not being able to get their hands on expensive toolchains, that's their problem once they can get their hands on the source and that's you holding that back based on the assumption that they won't be able to do anything with it.
They're a consumer business, they get to be compared against other similar businesses. A product's quality rating shouldn't depend on the size of the company.
I shall remember the next time I drop a large dime to pick up something marketed as 'reliable', 'high-end', etc., that if it doesn't meet expectations I should just suck it up and limp along with whatever the vendor gave me. Good to know.
I agree with you mostly about why it would be expensive, but Teenage Engineering doesn't have a reputation for building reliable devices. I own an OP-1, owned two POs and considered getting an OP-Z only to be scared away by all the reports about poor hardware quality and support.
The OP-Z plastic casing apparently bends. Sometimes it comes like that out of the factory (or more likely gets that way during storage and transport) often times it bends with use. This means that buttons will slide out of position, keys will trigger multiple times, etc.
The manufacturer doesn't have any solution to the above problem and returning it for a replacement may result in a straight case or more of the same. All signs indicate that it's a design defect, but TE haven't recognised this and they're getting punished in reviews.
The POs are flimsy, and the knobs tend to be imprecise and "jump" between values. One came with rust on a metal part because of TEs creative open packaging which exposes the devices to the surrounding environment.
The OP-1 itself seems solid as far as hardware goes so far, but it has other issues. It's noisy for one, which goes against claims of audio quality. The software's buggy and it records clicks together with the incoming audio, especially when recording external instruments. These are all well known problems.
And given that the OP-1 is supposed to be a synth, or at least a groovebox, it's surprisingly hard to create good sounding patches with it.
> Design focused - Who is the product for? It isn't for people who want to spend 250$ on a Behringer mixer.
Seems like it's competing against the Tascam model line. I have a model 12 that I'll bet blows it out of the water in the reliability department at almost half the price.
It's not as small but it's pretty and rock solid, Tascam has a great track record (no pun intended)
I've been looking for a tiny mixer with 3 band eq + FX sends per channel for a while to run synths and/or decks through. This look like this might fit the bill. The compressor on each channel is a bonus. I'm not entirely sure if there's alternative products that would work for me instead, but this has my attention.
Good to be here occasionally, considering writing up some blog posts I figured this community might find interesting. Seems like we are well liked enough that it might be fun
> This is also one of the biggest strengths of the company, if you want something cheap you're looking in the wrong place.
Well, they can do cheap. Their range of Pocket Operator stuff is cheap and hilariously fun. I gotta admit, I did click through to see if this was gonna fall into the “cheap and fun” category l8ke them, or the “more serious and priced appropriately” like the OP Z. I’m not the target market for a $1100 mixer, if it’d been more toylike and in the few hundred dollar range, I’d be very tempted. )
Idunno, I'm pretty sure I'm at least one of their target demographics - casual electronic musician with more money than free time who buys mostly portable gear for no easily justifiable reason whose been bought multiple battery powered mixer solutions and been waiting for a real one for almost a decade - and I still dropped my jaw pretty seriously at the price.
Im all for appreciating the engineering challenges you articulately outlined but price points like this just alienates anyone who isn't completely reckless with money. TE has gone in this direction before and my hope is always that it's the first prototype move towards a more available version of the product.
Would serious musicians buy this? Would fringe weirdo musicians buy it? Whose left other than wealthy dilettantes? I honestly don't know but I love this company and want to support them. My wife would just (rightly) leave me or put us in marriage counseling if I dropped this much money on this thing. And I really, really (really) want / need ("need") it...
> If you are trying to figure out why you'd pay for this you aren't their target market. It's far more interesting (to me) to think about why some people WOULD pay for this and what a market looks like that you are not a part of
That's assuming there is a sufficient market to justify TE's development and manufacturing costs. Not every product is successful, and it may be some time before if we figure out if this one was or not. I could see how some people would find the OP-1 to be an indispensable part of their workflow, but it's not clear to me why someone would think they need this particular mixer. (Some people will buy it because it looks cool, or they want some particular built-in feature, but are there enough of those people?)
> Small Volume - each unit is more expensive than a large volume product, you don't get price breaks on any components or tooling costs
Teenage Engineering has made lots of low volume products that were way cheaper, though. It just doesn't seem like they're interested in doing that anymore.
I think they just realized that they can make slightly fancier products that they sell for 10x the price and that's way more profitable.
I was close to agreeing with you, and then I noticed that TE does the classic Apple tactic of taking the USD price of $1200 and simply changing it to GBP and claiming it's £1200 without taking into account the exchange rate at all. So, I highly highly doubt these prices are due to low volume.
I would understand if it was $600-$800, but not $1200 come on...
I didn’t have the why is it so expensive reaction at all. Mine was “looks really expensive but maybe it’s not”, and then disappointment in the cost. However I totally expected it to cost around $1000. I don’t qualify as anything other than a noodler so I wouldn’t spend that money on it, but as you say professionals would.
Chip/hardware complexity. We actually put some serious resources into trying to get this to work, wish we could have made it a reality
And no, open sourcing would be incredibly difficult to do with hardware that has multiple chips and requires people to have expensive programming tools. If it was an ARM you could just plug a USB cable into that'd be one thing, this just wouldn't work without a ton of support
And glad you liked it! I'm quite proud of it all in all
There are those pre-installed samples there already, they couldn't just be swapped out with an imported file – there's something special about those files?
Anyway I think it's hugely underrated, hopefully you guys can do a v2 sometime. I'm blown away whenever I use it, it feels like a huge technical achievement.
Technically they could and that as well was something we looked into. Honestly it was the most complicated thing I've ever done. Would love to give it another shot some day!
> Reliable. For people that rely on their tools to be creative or appreciate design. You are paying a premium. See Apple for lots of examples.
Apple is basically the opposite of what you are saying. Apple products have moderate design in them that’s useful and they are also quite unreliable, but they still come with the premium. That premium funds their marketing and silicon development.
I absolutely love their design language. I'll never have a need to own any of their products but I wish I could buy the gadgets I do need/want with this kind of design/style.
Reminds me of the time I swapped out the main headlight of my Volvo 850. It required no tools, merely pulling on some large sprung wires with convenient finger rings. It had a very Lego friendliness to the whole process. Lego of course is Danish, Volvo (at the time) and TE being Swedish.
In a very similar fashion, I was pleasantly surprised that I can tear down every mechanical part of my Dyson cordless vacuum to wash them without a single tool.
On the subject of Volvo, I'm shortlisting the Polestar 2 as a candidate for my next car.
I have sold and bought the OP-1 twice now. At one point, I tried to replace my DAW and synths workflow with the single OP-1 unit. It didn't work. Three years later, I missed the OP-1 sounds and bought it on a whim, but I realized again how limited the sound palette is and its ability to work alongside non-OP-1 instruments. Both times, its aesthetic appeal and aspirational dream won over the rational me. It is a cool device. I will stick to Ableton Live, a few synths, and a midi controller.
You have to make sure where it's coming from - which of course we can't do from a single comment. For example, the best place where it could be coming from is self-expression. Owning and using something can be cultivating a relationship with oneself and also a signal for others, and if it's genuine, then it's basically communication of a very valid human need, which is self-expression and seeking the validation for it, thereby validation for oneself's existence and affiliation.
I'm so jealous. It's the one thing I lust after but can't justify. I wish I could rent one and see how bad it twists the knife towards pulling the credit card out.
It's always depressing to look back on the time I hopped on a backorder list for one then gave up after months of waiting only to have them gradually get more and more expensive when restocked. I really wanted to get one early on but dear lord they are so expensive now days.
If the people who design the atrocious touch screen interfaces inside of cars could get educated by the nice people at teenage engineering, that would be swell.
I was just watching some reviews of electric cars and noticed a tendency to remove all tactility.
Some of the models have "touch" buttons for drive mode, and things like environmental controls being touch or on screens is horrid.
It's bad enough having to look away from the road for a fraction of a second to find the AC switch in my Nissan, these newer "solutions" just feel plain unsafe.
Don't worry- it's ok if you look away from the road to navigate the air conditioning menu because the automatic pedestrian and obstruction sensing camera will stop the car for you!
There was a collaboration with IKEA, where teenage engineering designed the bluetooth loudspeakers. I have the big ones (10x20cm) and they are alright for a small room or to take with you to the garden. Nice but nothing special. The tiny ones for 19€ were really something - nice design, good sound for the size and price, and really, having a rotating knob on such a small stylish thing feels just great.
Their website shows heavy influence from Swiss design, [1] with grid-based layouts and ragged-right lowercase grotesque type. I actually haven't seen such a textbook example since Microsoft's Metro. [2]
Whatever all this stuff is does look good, but the website doesn't do a good job of explaining what it is, IMO. I know this is because I'm not their target market, but maybe they'd bring me into that market if they did a bit of explaining somewhere on the site of why I might be interested in their gear?
TX–6 is our ultra-portable, battery-powered
mixer and multi-channel audio interface. comparable to larger units, but with even more tech packed into one sturdy little machine.
I’d say that’s pretty damn clear what it is and that it’s “ultra portable.” What were you expecting them to add?
And those people definitely aren't in the market for a $1200 audio interface. If you don't own several pieces of gear already, this device has literally no use. If you do own several pieces of gear and want to record and mix them simultaneously, a $1200 interface is not going to be the first one you purchase.
It is a specialized tool for a specific set of tasks. If you don't even know what this (very clearly named and commonly known in the industry/hobby) type of a tool is used for, you definitely don't have a need for it.
Your issue with it is akin to someone complaining that a promo page for a premium-tier oscillator clearly states that it is an oscillator, but doesn't explain what oscillators are and what they can be used for.
That's wouldn't really be possible. You'd have to have audio equipment to be interested in an audio interface. Trying to sell outside that market doesn't really make sense.
It would be like trying to convince someone without a camera to buy your camera lens.
Like most Teenage Engineering products, it's an absolutely amazing-looking, well-engineered product with a ton of functionality that does a thing I don't actually need for far more money than I can justify spending on it.
TE products tend to be poorly manufactured. Go look at an op-z that bends and causes double trigs, with soft non standard feet you need to turn to open to get access to the interior of the device. Take a look at all the pocket operators they break regularly (I owned 4 and two broke from even casual use) and you cannt get spare parts like screens from te.
And ton of functionality? Go take a look at the ob-4 a Bluetooth speaker with a radio, a sort of tape delay thing, and no audio out.
I used to be a fan of teenage engineering but the low quality of the products I've had of theirs and the extremely high prices have led me to a totally different conclusion.
This mixer is overpriced and requires super special teenage engineering slimline cables to fit all of its inputs at the same time.
I am looking for a portable mixer but this monstrosity by a company that has a history of quality issues is not the mixer I am looking for.
A sequencer for the /mixer/ is terribly terribly useful. Basically like having control parameters in a tracker, but for any arbitrary input you've plugged into the mixer. And knowing TE, I would be shocked if you couldn't target the mixer params with the sequencer. (Arguably, this is part of the value prop (hahahahahaha) for modular synthesizers.)
The synthesizer is probably more 'because they can,' once the rest of the software/hardware interface is in place. It's close enough to what they've already done lots of with the pocket operators; might as well throw one in so people can prototype sounds easily.
Lucky for you. Once I tried to copy a single audio file to my ipod without going through the whole itunes journey. Spoiler alert: In the end I just stopped using apple stuff.
It worked before the firmware update through a Winamp plug in. But to your point I will be avoiding this product in the same way I avoid Apple products.
What bothers me is that I would absolutely buy this if it was bigger and had 1/4" balanced or stereo TRRS inputs, I actually have a variety of input sources in my home office that gets dual use for work, gaming, and music. But to use this I would need to go XLR to 3.5mm (and no phantom power?) for my voice and amp mics, main out to a Y split 1/4 TRS for speakers, and 1/4" to 3.5mm for a synth. So my desk would be littered with annoying adaptors just to slim down the inputs to fit in those teeny jacks.
A built in channel strip that I can keep setup for my mic (gate, compressor, EQ), plus a metronome for practicing, easy connectivity to my tablet to record myself a bit? Absolutely worth it.
There are lots of desktop mixers with regular-size connectors available, some with audio interfaces and effects. This one is super small and based on mini jacks - that's its differentiator.
Main difference from the similar-space BlueBox seems to be having little faders instead of a touchscreen. And it's twice the price. Design looks nice, hard to evaluate the usability from pictures. Menu diving on little screens can be rough.
My apogee duet sucked. Always had problems being recognized by logic and eventually they stopped providing updates to the software. Got a Motu M4 which is much cheaper and has been worlds better.
That sucks. I had the opposite experience, for those curious. I still have my firewire duet, I’ve been using over 10 years. Works great. It is unfortunate they stopped updating the software. My 2010 mac mini is running OS 10.11, and it works.
Small, portable mixers with lots of stereo inputs are relatively rare. That plus the Teenage Engineering "tax" (think Apple tax but for synth-heads) is driving the price. A cheaper, but slightly less tactile alternative is the 1010 Music Bluebox:
Yeah, I have a BlueBox and it works great. You can also add tactility with an external controller like: https://intech.studio, and you're still in the ballpark of like half the price of the TE mixer. I mean, I still want one, though. LOL.
Most synth heads I know don't like teenage engineering and see them as overpriced underengineered nerd tech.
I own an op-z and used to own some pocket operators. They will be the last teenage engineering products I own. Everything they release seems more ridiculous all the time. Just the ob-4 is enough for me to say "these are not products for synth people but tech nerds who want synths"
As with all things, YMMV. I've had my OP-1 for nearly 10 years and I've gotten a hell of a lot of use out of it. As a super portable, battery powered instrument with lots of different synth engines and diverse FX it's been great for travel, noodling on the couch, and jamming with friends.
I also have to give TE props for their long term support and updates on the OP-1. I mean, just last fall they added USB audio in/out on a 10+ year old synth! Few other major synth manufacturer I know of hav as good a track record (Novation is actually pretty good in this respect as is Elektron, but for the most part they're fixing bugs not adding new features).
Compare this to another boutique synth outfit like DSI/Sequential -- my DSI Pro2 purchased in 2014 only got about 4 years of support before they dropped it like a hot potato. Tempest suffered a similar fate. Never buying another DSI/Sequential instrument again...
Indeed I do occasionally wish the bluebox also acted as an interface, but I also really like the fact that the Bluebox is a stand alone recorder (unlike the TX-6). I often don't want to be sitting in front of a computer when I'm jamming and making music.
There are two USB interfaces on the bluebox -- one for power, the other USB midi devices.
For everyone drooling over the design of this, here’s a fun little form-over-function tidbit from the fine print:
> high quality, slimline cables custom-made for TX–6. the narrow profile allows you to use all 6 channels at once and makes for an easy pack down.
Sounds like the input jacks are so close together not every 3.5mm audio cable will work with it. Like a phone without a headphone jack - bring a special adaptor or no sounds for you. Lol
yes, but you can use non-adjascent ports with standard 3.5mm audio cables - if you are that bothered, assume it's a 3 channel board with an option to upgrade to 6 if you buy the special cables.
They could have brilliantly designed their way out of that by making the whole thing ~1.5cm wider (3mm extra five times).
A zoom h6 is a well designed portable battery powered mixer / audio interface with 4 easily accessible inputs and two that might need an adaptor depending on your cabling. It also comes with two high quality microphones, and records without being tethered to another device. For $409
Balanced inputs are useful for cancelling noise in long cable runs. There are no long cable runs if your target audience is people making aesthetic 60s instagram videos of their “synth jam in nature” with $2000 of gear in shot and $2000 more to film it.
Exactly. This is the type of equipment to appear in shot of your recording studio YouTube video not the kind of thing you find back of house at a professional setup.
Taking a look at a pic of the back the jacks look to be about 3mm apart, which seems fine for most 3.5mm straight jack cables. What I'm betting is that most people don't have 6 3.5mm to 3.5mm cables, given that most boards and interfaces take 1/4"
3mm of space only leaves room for 1.5mm of extra radius per cable. I just eyeballed my cable drawer and I only saw one kind that might fit next to each other with that little clearance. It’s gonna be a pain… not a huge pain, but a pain nonetheless. idk why they couldn’t just add a little extra width and avoid the pain with most cables. Especially since what you’ll need most of the time isn’t going to be the 1/8” to 1/8” cables they’re going to give you - but 1/4” to 1/8” cables - since most instruments have 1/4” outputs
To be fair, 3.5mm and 1/4" are virtually equivalent ports, and the only reason 1/4" is used for audio interfaces is because of convention (and probably because it's easier to grab). Converters between them should be dirt cheap.
It's not like Apple shipping 2022 iPhones with Lightning v/s USB C
Converters are an issue when the whole point is small size.
I wish they'd develop a full USB-C alternate mode for pro audio.
One C cable could do dozens of channels, or one of legacy analog, and provide clean regulated power for wireless gear, and the connectors pack very densely.
You could even make it daisy chainable, plus speakers could be powered over PD at small shows, and so could lights.
I feel like digital cables is a fundamentally backwards-idea for audio devices. Audio is analog and if you're going to be using digital cables, you'll just need to add a bunch of DACs in the chain.
It’s not about the cost of cables. It’s about the inconvenience of only some cables working. What happens if you lose/forget a cable, or if one dies on you while you’re out in the world using it? It’s much easier to replace a 3.5mm cable than it is to replace a 3.5mm cable that has a pretty narrow spec to it.
It’s also about what people will have. Walk into any show in the world and they’ll have XLR, and most productions will have 3.5 in their bag of tricks. But a specialized cable is something you’ll have to depend on yourself for.
This is actually an advantage in some cases - if you have an iPhone for example there’s very likely to be someone nearby with a charger just because how common they are.
Hoo boy, Teenage Engineering is starting to get on my nerves. This is a neat piece of kit, but the specs on it pretty much relegate it to the "toy" category of their lineup. You're telling me people are going to use this 48kHz dongle as a portable DAC? You probably have a better output on your laptop. Pretty absurd. This thing is pretty much a physical iPhone app... that costs more than an iPhone.
What really pisses me off about this is the price. Yes, please dogpile me about how "specialty hardware like this doesn't exist", that totally excuses this thing's existence! Seriously though, you can buy a brand new Octatrack for this price (actual professional equipment). But if this thing isn't competing with the OT, what's it's purpose? Being a digital multitrack recorder? Feeling nice in your pocket? Just being smaller than it's competitors no matter the expense?
The more I look at this thing, the more it annoys me. Teenage Engineering has always been about shipping hipster audio products, but even their older stuff was fairly passable. As much as I despise the OP-1 (even moreso after it's price hike), it had a lot of cool ideas in it. It was an obvious labor of love. I can't make heads or tails of this TX-6. I genuinely don't know who would buy this. In my head, I'm watching bourgeoisie college students walking around San Francisco to make lo-fi hip hop from found sounds with this thing. That's it. I can't see anyone using this in a professional setting. The OP-Z is an actual joke in the pro audio community, but I've still seen people use it at shows. The Pocket Operator is little more than a cheap toy, but people have fun sketching rhythms on them and even using the later models as super lo-fi samplers. This is... nothing. I truly and honestly don't understand it.
Try to think of it in the same context as a watch. There are price ranges from $10 to probably $1M+. They all have a function of tell you the time. Price is a silly thing to be upset about it unless you truly needed it to live (which no one does).
That actually makes sense. Watches are a status item and, as OP (pardon the pun) points out, Teenage Engineering is a bit of an aspirational/hipster brand.
God this thing is gonna look and work so much worse with 10 cables hanging out of it. Probably isn't even heavy enough to stay in one place against all of that mess, but yeah there's about a million times I can recall where having such a thing in the bag would have saved someone's bacon.
I do also expect to see plenty of hipsters unnecessarily self-flagellating themselves with it, per TE tradition.
Love Teenage Engineering, though I've never been able to justify buying something from them (especially not this!). Though I am looking forward to the Playdate [0], which they designed.
Never heard of this before now but it looks really fun. Somehow I can't help thinking that just a dash of color might have made it more interesting. But it seems like it keeps things simple. $180 seems really steep for this but they have some kind of hipster edge here. I'm not even completely turned off for $180 for this lo-fi unit.
Since it's called 'playdate' and since it looks kinda retro -- a cable to play head-to-head games like the original Nintendo GameBoy did would be pretty cool.
Pocket operators are (relatively) cheap and a whole lot of fun! I have the po-33 which is a sampler. It's amazing how much you can do with it. One of those devices where the limitations force you to be creative.
Can thoroughly recommend if you're in any way inclined. Their other pocket operators are more synthy, but I'm a hip hop head so naturally gravitated towards the sampler.
Once, just once, I would like to see someone say “why is this so expensive, it’s just […]” and then build one themselves, and bring it to market, for that lower cost. Go ahead, just try.
If you actually build one yourself (not just limited to this particular mixer, but also e.g. analog synthesizers, FM synthesizers, samplers, …), you'll be surprised by how ridiculously overpriced almost all of the available audio hardware really is. The sad part is that in many cases your prototype will be cheaper than the commercially available audio hardware.
In practice you'll probably skip the "and bring it to market" step though, because usually you'll start such a project because you wanted to have a specific mixer/synthesizer/sampler/…, and once you have it on your desk, the next project usually looks more interesting than spending the extra time to sell whatever you just developed.
I don't do this for a living and can't imagine how a statement like "your prototype will be cheaper than commercially available options" could be taken seriously by anyone.
If you don't count your time whatsoever and don't go for the nice case design.
I mean at the extreme case, if you can tolerate 40ms of latency and stuttering, a Raspberry Pi and some USB soundcards can do it all. The actual power needed is reasonable and ADC/DACs aren't that insane.
A Teensy 4.1 connected to an ESP32 could probably do most of this, if you wanted to do $15k of software development in your spare time and were really good at DSP.
Interestingly enough, it seems like the KORG wavestate is actually based on some Raspberry Pi, according to KORG's github page, so you can definitely get less than 40ms latency and no stutter. And yeah, Teensy or even FPGA evaluation boards can get you very far, since software development in your spare time is "free". If you search the web, you'll find many examples of such projects. For example I remember some FPGA based project with iirc a small ~50€ Spartan-6 eval board which implemented a fancy 32 voice 6op FM synthesizer.
I wonder how they're doing it? Do they have a custom kernel?
Or maybe they just have some good IO. It doesn't seem to be CPU limited exactly, it's just the built in sound device doesn't like it if you turn down the block size too much. USB cards are a bit happier.
Anyone who can tolerate 40ms of latency should stick to Bluetooth. If it's more than 3ms, it's already more latency than a good RF system gives you, if it's more than 10ms things are getting questionable, and at 20+ms you've lost the ability to monitor, because what your fingers/voice do and what your ears hear are now noticeably out of sync. Try singing while monitoring yourself at 20ms delay. It's hilarious.
> The sad part is that in many cases your prototype will be cheaper than the commercially available audio hardware.
Are you including those probably custom knurled knobs, buttons and sliders in that guesstimate too? Because those are the sort of things I'd expect to bring the cost up here. Heck, that beautifully finished aluminum case with its beveled edges alone is good chunk of money.
Except that's exactly the point: if you do this in your spare time, the development time is essentially "free". The only things that cost money if you do it in your spare time are the actual materials / PCBs / components / energy. And that is in fact rather cheap, provided you have the necessary skills and tools.
Since this whole post was about a Teenage Engineering hardware module originally, which has a strong focus on the case: if you own / have access to the necessary tools already (e.g. lathe, milling machine, …), it's a bit time consuming but not exactly expensive to build something similar. Sure, e.g. aluminum costs money, but together with the electronics I'd be surprised if you really spend 1200€ (price of the TX-6). Of course in that case it wouldn't really scale if you wanted to produce more modules in the end. For completeness, the TX-6 page specifically mentions the ADCs and DACs used. If you check the (current!) prices on mouser/digikey, they are ~5€ for the 4ch ADC chip (you'll need 3), ~15€ for one of the DAC chips and ~13€ for the other one. Then maybe add some fancy STM32 microcontroller for another 15€ and you essentially got the digital part already, excluding wireless connectivity. You'll still need a few analog components, the faders, the switches, connectors, and a display (probably the most expensive part). Feel free to guesstimate what the complete electronics and aluminum case would cost, but as I said, I'd be surprised if you get even close to 1200€, even if you need a 2nd revision of the electronics.
There are also various examples of people building e.g. clones of Moog synthesizers like the Minimoog (including keyboard, wooden case, …) in their spare time, for less money than what the original Moog synthesizer would cost.
What all the people disagreeing with you are ignoring is the work and skill that goes into the product design. It takes a lot of iteration, which means lots of prototypes, which means lots of time and money spent just developing the product. This means iteration on the electronics, the UI, the case, etc etc. Anyone could whip together something that's bigger, uglier, and has a worse user interface, all for less money, but to make something equivalent to what TE makes is a what takes all the time/money/effort/skill.
Also most of the disagreers are also ignoring the "bring it to market" step. Even if you built something of equivalent product design as TE, building one for yourself is vastly different than doing a product run where you expect each product to be the same. PCB design and manufacturing is relatively easy and inexpensive, but all the plastic/rubber forming/molding is much trickier and significantly expensive. Getting past the manufacturing aspect, there's the whole marketing, sales, and distribution aspect, which aren't anything to be sneezed at either. Seriously a lot of work goes into bringing a product to market that DIYers building single devices or very tiny runs of devices don't even consider. While TE might not be doing Behringer-level runs of products, their runs are definitely bigger than a lone DIYer could ever handle by themselves.
(Note: This isn't to say that TE's products are necessarily better for everyone than something they could make themselves (or buy for less from a different company), of course. After all, the world's musicians got by just fine before this mixer was released. I just wanted to chime in and explain some of reasons why TE's stuff costs more than what you might think you could make yourself.)
Not really a valid argument. Plenty of similar products out there with more competitive prices. "Make this complex product yourself" is the equivalent argument as "if you don't like something with your country just leave." People can complain that something is expensive.
It's not quite the same thing as the TX-6, but if I were to go to the substantial effort of making a small mixer product marketed to people like myself, that's the sort of competition I would be intimidated by, not Teenage Engineering.
If you insist on the portable form-factor, it will be slightly troublesome.
If it's going to sit on a desk and be used all the time, a Behringer 1222USB is $250 when they aren't running a special sale. It has more channels, some usable effects, and you can add an iPad Mini with some synth software to handle the rest of the functionality. So that's half the price, and you get to play with the iPad whenever you aren't making music; or it's about 1/6 the price of the TX-6 without the synth.
You don’t get the “look” - some people will buy this for the portability but a majority will be using it to fit into a particular look they want.
Think YouTube podcast where everything on the desk is sleek and apple or apple-like. This fits in in a way the Behringer doesn’t.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find YouTube videos with this on the desk but obviously not being used - where the actual dirty work is done offscreen.
Don't people do that all the time and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed? Isn't this why we have competitive products and competing price points for most things?
My understanding is that anker got started with standard white labed alibaba type goods, but differentiated themselves with good curation, meaning you actually got something decent at a low price
No need to try as it already exists: Any Linux tablet with Reaper and a couple soft synths and a decent external sound card if needed would do a lot more for a lot less. A good portion of the cost of this device could be justified only if it really had motorized knobs and faders, which are shown in the video but not mentioned among the features; that would be a completely unnecessary gimmick (in such a device) which however would impact a lot on the cost.
Portable music devices aren't that expensive these days. Take a look at what SunVox can do on old hardware, or maybe the Polyend Tracker, which is a hardware solution that costs less than half of the tx-6 and doesn't kill the eyes on a toy display.
If it was a digital recorder similar to a tascam portastudio I could see it being really awesome as a sort of high end version of the standalone recording system but just an interface seems incredibly overpriced - you can buy compact interfaces already (they’ve been designed for video applications by zoom and tascam) that have quality preamps and great battery life which also function as recorders. It does look nice though. I hope they are able to scale up on their products so they become more affordable because I would really like to but their synth but I am not quite in the experience bracket to justify it but it seems really fun.
Yeah, agreed that this I s an insane price point given that (unless I’m missing something) there’s only one preamp and it only works for an inline headphone mic.
It's an elegant little box. Some of those pictures seem to be renders, though. It doesn't really have motorized sliders.
Apple used to have a "no cables in ads" thing.[1] TE is copying that. In use, this box has a lot of cables going in, so it will look like a mess. So they never show it in use.
For electronic music performances it's common to bring your own portable desktop mixer(s). Then you pull the stereo output from that into the PA mixer. PA guy does very little during the performance.
If you don't have a lot of gear (which is increasingly the case because of more integrated music tools) you only need a small mixer for this purpose. If you have a lot of gear you may want small sub-mixers.
Okay but if you don't have a lot of gear, this thing is well outside of your budget, several times over. You'd bring your cheap behringer, yamaha, mackie, etc. mixer instead. You're doing a performance, you packed for that.
And if you can afford this thing, you're not going to do live mixing with it. You bring your flight case with all your performance kit instead.
> Okay but if you don't have a lot of gear, this thing is well outside of your budget
That's a strange assumption. I have more money, therefore I need more gear to play music?
> And if you can afford this thing, you're not going to do live mixing with it. You bring your flight case with all your performance kit instead.
And that case doesn't contain a mixer? I don't see how using this live and bringing your setup in a flight case are mutually exclusive.
The only other realistic use cases for this are for a portable/temporary studio setup or a really cramped bedroom studio. There's certainly little obvious use for it in an already well equipped studio.
Don't reverse an argument and expect it to still hold up, because it doesn't. It's the other way around: if you don't have lots of money, you don't have this kind of "toy" gear (because this is a --super cool, wish I had a use-case for it-- "because I can" piece of kit). You first buy the stuff you (or your band) actually needs. Including a decent mixer that doesn't break the bank. There are lots of perfectly decent <$400 mixers to be had.
And if you are a professional (EDM or otherwise) musician and you have regular gigs, you probably already spent some money on a better-than-$400 mixer and you're still not going to use this device because you have more a reliable TRS+XLR mixer for your live gigs.
This device is just for "toss in a backback, and have fun" (either alone on the go, or hanging out with other musician friends). Unfortunately, and necessarily, very expensive fun.
> It's the other way around: if you don't have lots of money, you don't have this kind of "toy" gear
Yes, but you suggested that if you don't have lots of gear, this is outside your budget. That is a different argument. That you can construct a new argument doesn't somehow invalidate my response to your previous argument.
well, I wouldn’t, because it has a switch that can be easily thrown and it costs way too much for what it does. so I don’t understand its market. but if it weren’t for those reasons not to use it, then I might for the same reason I would use a 1010 bluebox or any other similar minimalist mixer. size, weight, utility. something like this would be useful for a submix of 1/8” gear. just look into the types of musicians who love the 1010 boxes
I saw "from $199" and thought this looked like an incredible deal. Then realized it was just how the font was rendered, and it was actually "$1199". I'm not quite sure who the market for this is - that is crazy.
Every musician who has enough income to have their own production studio and likes to play with small batch gear. Because this is extremely small batch, good luck getting any Teenage Engineering products new one or two years after release. A product like this is effectively filling a niche inside a niche, and either you just don't even bother, or you charge what it costs to get your R&D back.
I wonder why it's so expensive, I know it should be higher than regular consumers expect because it's a low volume high quality product, but so is the OP-1 and that seems to have a lot more manufacturing overhead.
Wouldn't this product just contain a small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's? It's small but I think those should fit fine in that enclosure with a thick PCB.
Anyone know if there's anything really special in there? Not hating if there isn't, the product is probably worth it to many people regardless, just wondering.
edit: just to clear the easiest explanation, since it's even more niche than the OP-1 it needs that much more margin? If it sells 1/10th the quantity it needs 10x the margin maybe.
Look how beautiful and well-designed it is. This is almost beyond Apple-level taste. I would throw money at this company if I had the inclination to get into this kind of hobby :-)
edit: beyond just how it looks and the mechanical properties, I also wonder how much additional value they added during integration. Yes the BOM may sound trivial ("small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's") but IME it's easy to mess this up without a lot of extra attention. Example: my TV is plugged into a DAC which powers standing speakers, and every time I turn it on, there is a discontinuity that blasts a "pop" at maximum volume through the speakers regardless of volume level. Or you could end up with a line level hum if not shielded properly. Etc.
>I wonder why it's so expensive [...] Wouldn't this product just contain a small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's?
If tech products should cost the sum of their parts then an iPhone 14 Pro and an RTX 3090 should cost about $300. After all, they're just a PCB with some components on them.
You're ignoring the enormous R&D costs (engineering salaries, hardware prototyping, sales, marketing, support, etc.) that must be recouped, while also turning a profit, through the sale of each of these low volume products.
Developing consumer hardware in the west aint cheap, that's why most western brands other than Apple, and a few other high-end niche ones, pulled out of the consumer market.
Serious answer: expensive synths are the new expensive guitars. For the previous generation, guitar makers began cranking out premium priced guitars for purchase by people outside their prime music making years and into their prime earning years. Said guitars frequently just hung on the wall, which was fine because they were designed to be status items anyway.
Back in the day, it somewhat made sense that polyphonic synthesizers were expensive, since the electronics itself was expensive. Today, if you have a few weekends time, you can rather easily design your own custom analog polyphonic synthesizer in e.g. Eurorack format, manufacture it for something around 30-50€ (e.g. using some Chinese PCB manufacturer + their SMT assembly service), and the resulting module will outperform modern commercially available modules that cost multiple times more (think of a factor of 10x for the price difference).
It's even crazier if you look at digital synthesizers or samplers. Remember the E-MU Emulator from 1981, which cost more than $8000 when it was released? Today, a cheap 5€ microcontroller together with a 2€ DAC will give you more of everything already (more polyphony, more RAM, higher sample rate, more resolution per sample, stereo output instead of mono, …).
The trouble comes when it absolutely will not, because the sound of the 'vintage digital gear' is heavily influenced by the primitive DACS and typically non-miniaturized circuitry putting out a relatively low-bit sound with some serious beef to it.
This does not apply to the Teenage Engineering… except to the extent that they've specced it out with fancy internal parts. They may well be avoiding jellybean op-amps etc. and producing unusually high quality analog stages. It IS possible to do that: I think Make Noise does it very well, and from what little I know about the Teenage Engineering thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they were performing on a very high level even though there's nothing retro about any of it.
I'd love to see someone do a seriously overkill Pi DAC/ADC hat. What you're saying is not exactly untrue… just that the people habitually saying these things are also the farthest from being able to MAKE it be as true as they think. The Teenage Engineerings of the world are more likely to be able to deliver the goods.
> The trouble comes when it absolutely will not, because the sound of the 'vintage digital gear' is heavily influenced by the primitive DACS and typically non-miniaturized circuitry putting out a relatively low-bit sound with some serious beef to it.
The real question is if you want to accurately clone "vintage gear" or if you want to have something modern which is only somewhat "inspired" by "vintage gear". If you really want to create an accurate clone, sure, this is hard and potentially not that cheap, since it might require multiple hardware revisions before you're satisfied with the result. But if you only want to build something similar, which obviously won't sound exactly the same as the "vintage gear", then it's cheap and easy to do. Also keep in mind that you totally can get e.g. 8bit DACs or 12bit DACs if you really want. Even with "variable sample rate", like what some old digital samplers did. If you then play around with different interpolation algorithms, because modern microcontrollers are fast enough to allow you to do this, you'll get a sound that's surprisingly similar to "vintage digital gear". Sure, it won't be e.g. an E-MU Emulator, but does it really have to be one?
Interestingly it's still possible to do this. I'd cite the Behringer D, which has managed to get surprisingly close to the Minimoog; I've owned and disassembled a Behringer D.
At least with the one I had, it was designed in such a way that it continued to use the primitive electronic parts found in a real Minimoog, and key components such as rotary switches were designed to be similar to what the original device would have. The modern assumption is that all these things can be redesigned to handle barely the energy required by the waveform being passed: microminiaturized SMD components you'd get in cellphones, on microscopic traces. Behringer used some of the SMD components, but sourced others to be more like what you'd get in the old gear: wildly, wildly overspecced, so the waveform wold go through a switch that could pass two or three amps of current.
I've also seen a guitar compressor (from a different company, but you know Behringer is just as capable of making one this way, or taking their earlier designs and optimizing for cost once it's established), which was clearly designed like a cellphone. It was a flyspeck of a circuit, rather beautiful to look at in its tininess and elegance: I tried to play bass guitar through it and had to get rid of it as it sounded simply awful, taking away all of the instrument's tone. Not all of this was due to coupling capacitors designed to be as small as possible, though some of it was. Some of it was the sheer miniaturization of all components. This is never found in the 'vintage gear' or the modern stuff that matches it.
You can never design audio gear around only the bare limits of what is 'meant to be there'. It's a trap, there's a lot of success to be had in excess capacity to carry tone and sound. Interestingly, it's still really cheap and easy to go the 'vintage design' way, even if you're also using microcontrollers and SMD and all…
The Yamaha DX7, the quintessential digital-replacing-analog synth, cost $2k USD in 1983, not $4-5k. I can't speak for what that cost in Euros (which didn't exist yet) or with import tariffs in an unspecified country. Today you can get one used for $500 USD. And while analog is and was more expensive, today you can get a Behringer Deep Mind 12 for $900 USD new and it sounds fantastic.
Meanwhile, Teenage Engineering is selling a tiny digital synth for $1,200, which has less functionality than iPad. I find it hard to take serious as anything other than a design object but YMMV.
The niche application part is a little bit made up by them. Small mixers and audio interfaces are a HUGE market, and a saturated market. By going high end (by milling a case, for example) they shrink their market, but also shrink their competition. The number of portable mixers / audio interfaces / synthesizers (it’s a synth too???) with super fancy cases… they might be the only one? The keith mcmillian k-mix is the only thing even similar I can think of and it’s not that similar (and $699)
Edit: someone in another comment pointed out the 1010 music bluebox, which is definitely more similar to this than the kmix, for $549
Edit 2: I just remembered the existence of zoom recorders. The zoom h6 has 6 tracks, is a portable mixer and audio interface, and also includes 2 good microphones and can record without being tethered to another device. It’s about $400. It’s got a different vibe, but it’s also quite beautiful
Prosumer audio gadgets are a relatively small market, audio interfaces are a slice of that. Audio interfaces that function as mixers are even smaller.
There's been a boon with stream decks the last few years, but the only part of that market that's saturated is the low end. There really are not that many high quality mixers and audio interfaces out there, and they are not really in a small form factor like this.
Not to mention the codec shortage. Making a digital audio board right now sucks.
I think you might be underestimating the size of the market for audio interfaces and mixers - but that’s just a feeling mostly based on how many of them are on craigslist at any given moment in my city.
But either way you can’t deny they’re choosing to go high end. They could have scaled down the software features of this by 10-20%, put it in a less “jony ive” case and sold it for $300-600 - but then they would’ve had more competition.
The TAM for pro audio equipment was around $10 billion and growing when I left working in it a few years ago. One of the reasons the market is so terrible for manufacturers is that their own products on the secondary market cannibalize future sales, which puts a damper on demand. It's great for professionals that can afford the high prices and buy stuff that last decades, but not great for an industry that needs to make new sales each year and develop future products. There's always cool stuff to build and develop, don't get me wrong, it's just not worth a ton of money which means that development times are long, prices stay pretty high for the good stuff, and talent is constantly siphoned by other markets (for example: consumer loudspeakers and AR/VR products: Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon have been on hiring sprees for audio hardware/software developers for the last decade)
Over the last decade there was a growth in new products, but there's a lot of crap. There was also a lot of consolidation and acquisition because audio hardware manufacturing is such an expensive thing to do for a small market, particularly on the high end.
It's the mechanics that's expensive. The casing, the beautiful metal knurled knobs, all of the various parts made at very high quality in relatively low numbers.
Retired neurosurgical anesthesiologist with very little electronics knowledge here, enjoying reading ALL the comments — though I still haven't a clue what the TX-6 does. Why do I find the comments so absorbing? Because the high level of expertise evident in the majority of the comments refracts off their critiques of the device itself into life in general in a most entertaining fashion.
It's hard to describe. Pro audio equipment is such a remarkably different landscape from the rest of the tech industry, since we've really had all this stuff perfected for a couple decades. A product like this could have existed without a problem in the 90s, frankly the only bottleneck would be finding a way to store all the audio on there without putting in a hard disk.
I think people are rightfully a little miffed at this thing, because it's not so much "innovative" as it is "pretty". Teenage Engineering has always been about designing hip, good-looking items with practicality/functionality taking the backseat, but this is a pretty extreme form of that ethos. Almost like an April Fools prank, where they decided to mock themselves by releasing something so rudimentary at such a high price.
A good anecdote for their behavior is the OP-1. The OP-1 was a little plastic synth box with 4 rotary encoders, a handful of buttons, and an OLED screen. It sold for something like 800 dollars originally, and sold out fast. Unsure of how to react to their newfound popularity, TE re-stocked the model at $1200 and blamed some nebulous "supply chain" issues for the price increase. No additional features were added. No components were meaningfully upgraded. They simply increased the price of a thing that was now high in demand, and raked in a bunch of cash for doing it.
TE deserves all the criticism they can get if they want to target the highest-end of the market. Companies like Behringer exist on the opposite end of the spectrum, and are pretty well loved since they make cheap products with decent reliability that sound good. They exist almost solely to call out companies like TE who list massive markups on their machines to eke out a bigger profit, when their products can really be manufactured at a much lower cost.
Feel free to take away whatever you want from this rant, but there's a lot of stuff at play. I think the surprise is fairly justified, all things considered.
Oh, I just heard of this company and thought to myself that why are music instruments so expensive, but after reading the comments I have realised it's the Apple of it's kind.
If I were ever to go back to the Wintel world (or whatever the word is for Windows+AMD), Teenage Engineering's computer is probably the only one my wife would allow in the house:
I was looking at SFF cases, so I keep an eye open for lesser-known ones. I was willing to add another to the list of contenders, but I just don't get why that site asks for a password, and shows only one image of something that they're trying to sell.
I get that it's limited-run stuff, but why would they hide information about their product? Visiting their website is pretty much worthless if they only sell in batches, and don't allow access between batches.
They’re really bad at marketing, better check the subreddit or discord. It has been two years and this month it has finally launched, so it wouldn’t be insane to consider it.
The only contender is the JIMU D+ v2.0, or the Dan H2O if you can compromise on looks or quality.
Well that's the first time I've ever seen a 1:1 EIZO used in _anything_ marketing related.
That monitor used in their marketing photo is the EV2730Q and it's an absolute beast if you're looking for a balance between horizontal/vertical aspect ratios. Obviously not fantastic for gaming (minus Factorio), but for programming + shell work it's outstanding.
Interesting - I have monitors that are as far from 1:1 as you can get - super high ultra wide or whatever they call it, but they’re effectively 2:1 the way I use them.
Small Volume - each unit is more expensive than a large volume product, you don't get price breaks on any components or tooling costs
Design focused - Who is the product for? It isn't for people who want to spend 250$ on a Behringer mixer. It is for people who want something that is high quality and doesn't break. Reliable. For people that rely on their tools to be creative or appreciate design. You are paying a premium. See Apple for lots of examples. This is also one of the biggest strengths of the company, if you want something cheap you're looking in the wrong place.
Complex - the amount of balance of various components here adds a lot to the design and development costs. Battery is an unusual feature but puts it in a different product category. Balancing that with the audio quality and reliability is not a trivial problem. Add in wireless, audio drivers (not trivial at ALL), Complexity increases development time and adds risk to the long term stability of the product, that is added into the cost.
Most of the small features feel like somebody there thought it would be fun and/or easy to put in. It's a good way to iterate through design ideas, you have to see it in reality. That type of prototyping isn't easy. Most people don't use 90% of the features but when you are in a creative industry the 1% that does absolutely LOVES it and uses it in ways you never expected. It's difficult to balance the amount of development you put into fun things vs. business cases.
If you are trying to figure out why you'd pay for this you aren't their target market. It's far more interesting (to me) to think about why some people WOULD pay for this and what a market looks like that you are not a part of