New Teenage Engineering products

I’ll change my opinion.

I don’t know, this kind of stuff (and the last lot of clear pouches) makes me feel that detractors who in the past said “TE is over priced hipster shit” about the OP1 etc. might have been right after all.

I find their stuff from the last few years badly designed TBH, and even the OP1 had room for improvement from a quality of components used perspective.

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Harry Potter enthusiasts are really going to appreciate this! :zap:

I’m honestly just confused by Teenage Engineering as a brand. This is really expensive, and based on everything that is “coming soon”, it seems like a weird Kickstarter being sold as a final product.

Complete speculation, but I wonder if some of the recent weirdness (expensive plastic toiletry bag, expensive plain color shirts, etc.) is driven by those Chinese companies cancelling their smart speakers and the company experiencing a cash crunch.

Maybe I’m wrong, and this is just their dream version of what they ended up building for IKEA. “If only we could have gotten IKEA to bite on this design” kind of thing.

It does look cool, so that part is still on-brand :sweat_smile:

Madness…
To think this is the same company that made the PO-32 and PO-33 :man_facepalming: (though to be fair they were really due to the genius that is Magnus Lindstrom)

Fact of the day: did you know that Magnus Lindstrom also made the COW effect for the OP1 :grin:

They should just give Magnus free reign on their next product, it would be awesome

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#glamping

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Totally. This will be carried around by middle class kids/wankers at Glastonbury for sure!

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is he still part of the company?

@depuratumba No he never was, they did a collaborative with him. Magnus is the designer/programmer of microtonic and synthplant vst instruments

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#lifestyleaccessory

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I’ll grant you, if you showed me a picture of that and asked me who made it, I’d immediately know it was a TE product.

Cool though?

Like, would you be able to see The Rock walking round LA with one hanging from his ample, gate crushing shoulder, blasting out Banarama? Or Beyonce, kids in the trolley, walking round the farmers market with it strapped on instead of her Vuitton clutch bag?

Naaaaaaaaaa.

Not cool.

Not even near.

That’s the term I was hunting for - TE are a lifestyle brand more than anything at this point. There’s nothing wrong with that, but maybe we just need to stop expecting them to design another synth/wonder machine.

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Yeah I agree, maybe the golden age of TE has passed. They may be entering a new one, but looks like it’s not going to be music hardware focused… sadly
Should of made an OP Studio… 16 track in a form factor like polyend tracker. OP1 on steroids

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I’ll probably never buy another product from TE (and I’ve bought a lot of them; even went to their garage sale a couple of years ago and cleaned out the house) because of the horrible customer support, but let’s not get carried away:

Whether it’s worth the price or not is hard to say before we’ve heard what it sounds like, how it operates, what functionality we can expect, et cetera. I don’t find a really good portable speaker going for this price to be totally insane. It’s a lot of money for sure, but if it could work as the only speaker at home and when out and about, I would say it could be worth it for some people who wants the best of the best.

However, I kinda think TE dropped the ball on this one when it comes to their marketing. If I were them, I would have somehow told the community beforehand that this wasn’t a new synth or anything like that. Getting thousands of synth nerds hyped up for an OP-2 only to release a hipster speaker is probably not a very good idea.

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WHAT!?!

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I was hoping for a bigger reveal, but perhaps after a few updates it could prove to be more capable and interesting than it is now. For someone wanting to do battery powered jams in the woods, it might be fun, albeit overpriced. Glad to not feel like I need it though.

Last few releases have been underwhelming. Rick and Morty PO, Frekvens and Opz rumble module… now this.

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That is what we should expect from them.

They dont really focus on instruments anymore, they focus on design and concepts.

If that OB-4 wasnt brought up with a ridiculous 1 month weird scavenger hunt and riddles type teaser we might have been looking at it differently.

Now what that month long boring teaser saga might tell them, is that there is quite a public still waiting for them to release instruments.

hopefully they take that into account…

In the meantime, OP-Z, while far from a mature product is still getting consistent updates and is slowly getting there…maybe they have a game changer update in store at some point. It still is a cool bluetooth midi sequencer, I rarely use it for its synths engines.

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This is bonkers. Crazy bananas. It also kinda looks like that generic Ikea speaker, except it has a very ‘functional’ screen and that tape thing which sounds like a stupid gimmick.

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As one of the people with a fully functioning OPZ for a year and a half now, I’ve been pleased with the ongoing updates on that device. The wireless audio from the OPZ to the Ob-4 is interesting as I hate wires with all my heart and soul. It is funny though that the one function that really jumps out to me is the thing “coming soon.” That at least puts it in line with every other multifunction synth project of this year. So they’ve got that going for them.

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