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TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

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Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#331

Post by boomlinde »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #266
n42 wrote: post #73

am I missing something, or is that a giant paddle power switch that can/will be accidentally pushed downward to off while working? edit: nope, that's exactly what that is. $1,200 for a mixer you can't use live without duct taping it, I guess. https://teenage.engineering/guides/tx-6#power-on

Why would you use this live at all? You already have a proper mixer set up in those situations.

For electronic music performances it's common to bring your own portable desktop mixer(s). Then you pull the stereo output from that into the PA mixer. PA guy does very little during the performance.

If you don't have a lot of gear (which is increasingly the case because of more integrated music tools) you only need a small mixer for this purpose. If you have a lot of gear you may want small sub-mixers.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#332

Post by boomlinde »

ng55QPSK wrote: post #50
jelling wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious answer: expensive synths are the new expensive guitars. For the previous generation, guitar makers began cranking out premium priced guitars for purchase by people outside their prime music making years and into their prime earning years. Said guitars frequently just hung on the wall, which was fine because they were designed to be status items anyway.

Synths were always expensive. Polyphonic, analog Stuff was clearly in the 5-digit prices. Digitalisation brought this down to 4...5000€.

Seems like you're an order of magnitude off. I can get a decent digital synth for hundreds of euros.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#333

Post by bookofjoe »

smoldesu wrote: post #320
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…

Don't be so hard on yourself: that was hardly a rant, but rather an insightful analysis.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#334

Post by jareklupinski »

duped wrote: post #63

What bothers me is that I would absolutely buy this if it was bigger and had 1/4" balanced or stereo TRRS inputs, I actually have a variety of input sources in my home office that gets dual use for work, gaming, and music. But to use this I would need to go XLR to 3.5mm (and no phantom power?) for my voice and amp mics, main out to a Y split 1/4 TRS for speakers, and 1/4" to 3.5mm for a synth. So my desk would be lit…

i too was scrolling and hoping to see phantom power for at least one input :(

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#335

Post by ajxs »

IAmPym wrote: post #323
ajxs wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate your obvious experience in this area, however synthesisers with more features, and more complicated user interfaces than the OP-1 have existed longer than I've been alive. I know this is not from a small company, but take for instance Yamaha's SY77 from 1989. It's built around a 16-bit Hitachi H8/500 processor, with 1MB of SRAM. It's CPU, synth engine, and peripherals are all glued together with 7400-ser…

Good example we can explore! So in this case there are a lot of differences: Comparing TE with Yamaha is a pretty massive difference in size of engineering teams and overall engineering knowledge. In the 80s the products, while definitely complex, had some advantages: back then you could get very simple and precise parts from many manufacturers because you had more small chip foundries available. seriously, try and f…

> You’d think that the tools got better but… honestly? Not really...

Really? Aren't debugging interfaces light years ahead of where they were in the 80s? Yamaha's entire DX/SY line predate JTAG. There was no GDB back when Yamaha made the DX7. Parallel interfaces were probably theoretically simpler to debug than modern protocols like i2c and whatnot are today, I admit. And sure, the DX7's 16kb ROM is much smaller in scope than what is in the OP-1.

All these synthesisers perform the actual tone generation on proprietary LSI chips. You'll have a hard time convincing me that ADI's tooling is more difficult to use than whatever EDI tooling was available to Yamaha in 1982. The stakes aren't quite as high in modern software either. If they made an unforeseen design error in the LSI chip, that's game over.

> Battery or mobile products are no joke...

I don't doubt that. No doubt a battery requires a lot of complex design considerations. I'm sure balancing charge, size, and cost is difficult when it comes to batteries. How does this complexity compare to a synth like the SY77 using mains power? It steps that down to 5V, and 12V rails. I can't find the OP-1 schematics right now, I'm guessing it uses a single 5V rail from USB in.

> Then you have overall price...

This is true. I'm more talking about the complexity of its design. I picked the SY77 because it's closer in terms of the amount of features.

> There’s no one right answer to this but...

I don't doubt for a second that Teenage Engineering have some very bright people working there, and that they do great engineering.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#336

Post by Gravityloss »

I try to avoid 3.5 mm mini plugs in live performance equipment. I've had lots of problems with it. There's a reason why 6.3 mm normal plugs are standard. XLR is even better in many regards. I have never tried Mini XLR. I wonder if that could work.

There could be a plug that was small and flat like angled "pancake" jack yet not shorting and shielded like XLR.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#337

Post by Applejinx »

an-unknown wrote: post #284
Applejinx wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Interestingly it's still possible to do this. I'd cite the Behringer D, which has managed to get surprisingly close to the Minimoog; I've owned and disassembled a Behringer D.

At least with the one I had, it was designed in such a way that it continued to use the primitive electronic parts found in a real Minimoog, and key components such as rotary switches were designed to be similar to what the original device would have. The modern assumption is that all these things can be redesigned to handle barely the energy required by the waveform being passed: microminiaturized SMD components you'd get in cellphones, on microscopic traces. Behringer used some of the SMD components, but sourced others to be more like what you'd get in the old gear: wildly, wildly overspecced, so the waveform wold go through a switch that could pass two or three amps of current.

I've also seen a guitar compressor (from a different company, but you know Behringer is just as capable of making one this way, or taking their earlier designs and optimizing for cost once it's established), which was clearly designed like a cellphone. It was a flyspeck of a circuit, rather beautiful to look at in its tininess and elegance: I tried to play bass guitar through it and had to get rid of it as it sounded simply awful, taking away all of the instrument's tone. Not all of this was due to coupling capacitors designed to be as small as possible, though some of it was. Some of it was the sheer miniaturization of all components. This is never found in the 'vintage gear' or the modern stuff that matches it.

You can never design audio gear around only the bare limits of what is 'meant to be there'. It's a trap, there's a lot of success to be had in excess capacity to carry tone and sound. Interestingly, it's still really cheap and easy to go the 'vintage design' way, even if you're also using microcontrollers and SMD and all…

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#338

Post by MisterSandman »

eternityforest wrote: post #309
relaxing wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At 0.5mm pitch between connectors the crosstalk would be nasty.

I was thinking all-digital where possible, only using analog for 1 or 2 channel legacy connections

I feel like digital cables is a fundamentally backwards-idea for audio devices. Audio is analog and if you're going to be using digital cables, you'll just need to add a bunch of DACs in the chain.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#339

Post by TheRealPomax »

boomlinde wrote: post #331
TheRealPomax wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use this live at all? You already have a proper mixer set up in those situations.

For electronic music performances it's common to bring your own portable desktop mixer(s). Then you pull the stereo output from that into the PA mixer. PA guy does very little during the performance. If you don't have a lot of gear (which is increasingly the case because of more integrated music tools) you only need a small mixer for this purpose. If you have a lot of gear you may want small sub-mixers.

Okay but if you don't have a lot of gear, this thing is well outside of your budget, several times over. You'd bring your cheap behringer, yamaha, mackie, etc. mixer instead. You're doing a performance, you packed for that.

And if you can afford this thing, you're not going to do live mixing with it. You bring your flight case with all your performance kit instead.

Re: TX-6 – Teenage Engineering

#340

Post by boomlinde »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #339
boomlinde wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For electronic music performances it's common to bring your own portable desktop mixer(s). Then you pull the stereo output from that into the PA mixer. PA guy does very little during the performance. If you don't have a lot of gear (which is increasingly the case because of more integrated music tools) you only need a small mixer for this purpose. If you have a lot of gear you may want small sub-mixers.

Okay but if you don't have a lot of gear, this thing is well outside of your budget, several times over. You'd bring your cheap behringer, yamaha, mackie, etc. mixer instead. You're doing a performance, you packed for that. And if you can afford this thing, you're not going to do live mixing with it. You bring your flight case with all your performance kit instead.

> Okay but if you don't have a lot of gear, this thing is well outside of your budget

That's a strange assumption. I have more money, therefore I need more gear to play music?

> And if you can afford this thing, you're not going to do live mixing with it. You bring your flight case with all your performance kit instead.

And that case doesn't contain a mixer? I don't see how using this live and bringing your setup in a flight case are mutually exclusive.

The only other realistic use cases for this are for a portable/temporary studio setup or a really cramped bedroom studio. There's certainly little obvious use for it in an already well equipped studio.

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