[aa-jv]

Its not jealousy or any of those things - its a desire to see the audio industry improve upon itself, and not just pander to shiny-thing-obsessed hipsters.

Teenage Engineering have a long history of pandering to the bespoke-coveting hipster market, and for those of us who develop pro audio products, it is frustrating to see TE get the press for features that are well and truly established - at much more affordable prices, in less bespoke products - just because their products are less available/accessible, less affordable, and thus 'more exclusive'.

We in the audio world want MORE people to access great technology - not less - and we fight very hard to keep our BOM and other development costs low, so that we can actually produce superlative gear that pushes the state of the art forward.

TE do not produce superlative gear that pushes the state of the art forward. They produce bespoke parts with the bare minimum actual feature set required to qualify for entry into the pro audio market. For every dusty OP-1 sitting in a drawer, the user could've bought 5x the number of portable synth/jamstation units, and gotten a much better experience for it.

Anyway, hipsters, Teenage Engineering is jumping the shark. Get on the Zynthian or monome bandwagon already, shee-iissh ..

[boarsofcanada]

As someone who has both TE and monome gear along with Elektron, Moog, and a decent variety of other gear, I still don’t understand the hate toward TE and it reminds me very much of the Apple haters who bash the company no matter what they ship claiming it’s all over-priced and that you can get better gear for less.

Back in the early 2000’s people made the same sort of comments about Apple laptops that I see applied to TE where they claimed Apple made laptops for hipsters rather than serious machines.

I find monome a really curious example to use in particular because if anything norns is incredibly overpriced for what it does (something people call out regularly in forums).

TE makes a particular form factor that is small, light, easy to travel with, and easy to pull out and use with a small amount of space for a music setup. I pull out my TX-6 far more often than my Audiofuse Studio these days for that reason. Despite it being more expensive with fewer features the convenience for someone that doesn’t have a large dedicated space for music more than makes up for the price premium.

[aa-jv]

I have used all of this gear for years, and I have worked in product development in the pro audio industry for decades (you might even recognize some of the things I've worked on) and the thing I don't like about TE is the pretentiousness of their products, which are dressed up and fancy but fundamentally limited when compared to the competition. They don't provide good end value, all things considered - and especially not in a very competitive industry that is always innovating and finding ways to bring the BOM budget into reasonable levels.

monome is an example of a high-end/hipster product you can build yourself for peanuts, so don't overlook that factor. Plus, the ecosystem that its community has built, due to the open nature of its architecture, is superlative - similar to that of Zynthian, which has attained a huge faithful following for the same reason, and both Zynthian and monome are 100x more innovative than TE, for 1/8th the cost, generally.

I have a small form-factor recording device in my pocket already, which I simply plug a microphone into and start recording, right away, at seriously higher quality than I need for most purposes. It only cost me a couple hundred bucks, plus a couple hundred for a decent microphone, and it works far, far better than the flimsy bespoke parts of the TX-6 can withstand. Plus, it can do Internet and movies and music with a great deal of ease.

TE make good props for hipsters. They don't make great musical instruments.