Their design is S tier, usefulness on the other hand, C tier at best.
TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
281–290 of 343 posts
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#282Once, 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.
Honestly, this thing works pretty well for my use case:
https://www.amazon.com/Moukey-MK0149-RD-FR-Ultra-Low-Noise-6...
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.
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#283I 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 mean, I get that for all their other products. But this seems next level.
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 outpe…
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…
> 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?
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#285"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…
> doesn't break 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.
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.
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#286"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…
> 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?)
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#287Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ma…
As others have mentioned you're not considering the enclosure at all. And doubtful you're including your time, QA, etc.
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.
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#288Teenage Engineering is becoming the Apple of music production. So glad to see this level of design and innovation in this space!
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#289"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’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, la…
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
Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering
#290Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
1010music bluebox might work for you and is 1/2 the price.
Yes. If that was an audio interface too it would be a no brainer.