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TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

teenage.engineering

181–190 of 343 posts

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#181

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 adapto…

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"

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

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small run production with no expense spared of a designer product for niche applications. Expensive expensive expensive! That case looks like it was milled!

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…

The Zoom H6 has fabulous audio but… beautiful? Looks like a Klingon marital aid to me

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#183
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…

Hey! While you’re here, could you share why the Tempest doesn’t allow you to use your own samples?

Could you guys open source some parts of Tempest so people could keep working on it?

Asking as a Tempest owner and huge Sequential fan.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#184
post #175
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…

> 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.

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.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#185
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…

Hey! While you’re here, could you share why the Tempest doesn’t allow you to use your own samples? Could you guys open source some parts of Tempest so people could keep working on it? Asking as a Tempest owner and huge Sequential fan.

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

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#186
post #184
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…

> 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.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#187
post #36

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: https://1010music.com/product/bluebox

Bluebox doesn’t have a digital interface and can only record to an sd card. USB is only for power :/

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#188
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The TX-6 is aimed at people who own the other TE stuff which is 3.5mm. If you're looking for a solid audio interface, consider RME or Apogee.

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.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#189
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

I'm just trying to give you perspective

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.

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