TX-6 – Teenage Engineering • Hacker News Board

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#311

Post by eternityforest » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 9:57 AM UTC

an-unknown wrote: post #280

eternityforest wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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…

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.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#312

Post by ostenning » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

erichmond wrote: post #212

IAmPym wrote: post #159

"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. F…

As an owner of a Rev2 and a P6 really cool to see you here Pym!

p6 here :)

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#313

Post by jason0597 » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 11:31 AM UTC

IAmPym wrote: post #159

"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. F…

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...

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#314

Post by mgdlbp » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 11:51 AM UTC

alias_neo wrote: post #23

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.

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]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographic_Styl...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metro_(design_language)

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#315

Post by krageon » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 12:03 PM UTC

IAmPym wrote: post #297

repiret wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your making the assumption that one can buy 1000 of any part, which is likely incorrect These ain’t normal times

Are you lecturing someone who does this for a living on the environment of their specific professional setting? Why do you assume you know better?

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#316

Post by bookofjoe » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 12:34 PM UTC

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.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#317

Post by fennecfoxy » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 2:56 PM UTC

karmakaze wrote: post #117

alias_neo wrote: post #23

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.

Saab says hello

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#318

Post by kjs3 » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 4:23 PM UTC

IAmPym wrote: post #184

wyager wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Small sample size bias 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. Cra…

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.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#319

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

Lobosque wrote: post #288

Teenage Engineering is becoming the Apple of music production. So glad to see this level of design and innovation in this space!

In the sense that they're making overpriced hardware with proprietary connectors and insane profit margins? I think I agree, actually.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#320

Post by smoldesu » Fri, Apr 22, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

bookofjoe wrote: post #316

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.