(43 points, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35899498
TE have perfected milking hipsters to perfection
Honesty, a used cell phone would make a better pocket operator.
I enjoyed mine a lot / made a lot with it!
The EP series are also good bang for buck.
The OP series, along with the TP-7, TX-6 are luxury goods. If you’re trying to save money, they’re not for you. They are nice though.
.. a far better investment, with way more utility for the forward-thinking electronic-music making youngster ..
I just don't get it. Always the negativity.
And if it's all so bad, why not link us to a better product? Why just bitch? Seems like some weird form of jealousy?
I'm not sure there is anything to add beyond the original threads for this though. The price isn't coming from being over engineered though. Some people will like that, others won't. This one probably pushes that boundary more than even most other TE products though.
Teenage Engineering have a long history of pandering to the bespoke-coveting hipster market, and for those of us who develop pro audio products, it is frustrating to see TE get the press for features that are well and truly established - at much more affordable prices, in less bespoke products - just because their products are less available/accessible, less affordable, and thus 'more exclusive'.
We in the audio world want MORE people to access great technology - not less - and we fight very hard to keep our BOM and other development costs low, so that we can actually produce superlative gear that pushes the state of the art forward.
TE do not produce superlative gear that pushes the state of the art forward. They produce bespoke parts with the bare minimum actual feature set required to qualify for entry into the pro audio market. For every dusty OP-1 sitting in a drawer, the user could've bought 5x the number of portable synth/jamstation units, and gotten a much better experience for it.
Anyway, hipsters, Teenage Engineering is jumping the shark. Get on the Zynthian or monome bandwagon already, shee-iissh ..
Back in the early 2000’s people made the same sort of comments about Apple laptops that I see applied to TE where they claimed Apple made laptops for hipsters rather than serious machines.
I find monome a really curious example to use in particular because if anything norns is incredibly overpriced for what it does (something people call out regularly in forums).
TE makes a particular form factor that is small, light, easy to travel with, and easy to pull out and use with a small amount of space for a music setup. I pull out my TX-6 far more often than my Audiofuse Studio these days for that reason. Despite it being more expensive with fewer features the convenience for someone that doesn’t have a large dedicated space for music more than makes up for the price premium.
I think they spend much of their engineering budget on user experience.
For the ones who feel TE pricing is ridiculous, all you need is function and the experience of using something don't matter much - yeah then TE perhaps is not for you ?
Personally I see my OD-11's doing double duty as sculptures and speakers, bringing me more than just sound waves, most speakers are huge and ugly - these guys ooze 1960's and Kubrick
My OB-4 loop function brings a playful way for me to save loops for my wife to discover, so it's a social object as much as a minimalist boom box ?
To me these are art pieces with a personality and if you ever owned a painting or some jewellery, why should electronics always be about function and price with disdain for aesthetics... ..cables, dust balls and wall warts anyone ?
I sometimes prefer to not have a function if the price is an eye sore.
There's more to life than function.
Bring on the flames ♥
And you're right, I'll never get it I guess.
I'll spend more on something of equivalent features for only two reasons: build quality and freedom. Alas, most electronics nowadays offer neither, so cheapest it is.
You can get something like a Tascam DR-07XP for $150 and it does 32bit float format with essentially unlimited dynamic range. I will never need to buy another field mic.
They make expensive bespoke parts with barely enough features to lure in the punters, who delight in being special while devices 1/3rd the cost do far, far more ..