TP-7 Field Recorder | Hacker News Reader

TP-7 Field Recorder

teenage.engineering

28 pointsnirkalimi21 comments

Discussions at release (2023) - (171 points, 194 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35906292

(43 points, 27 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35899498

That discussion contains:

  TE have perfected milking hipsters to perfection

As someone considering buying a pocket operator for his son: How true is this? What are decent alternatives for PO?

Pocket operator (particularly the KO) is the single thing other than maybe the OP-Z that I think has enough creative utility relative to its price to not feel like glorified furniture.

I enjoyed mine a lot / made a lot with it!

It’s not true of their cheaper products, the POs especially.

The EP series are also good bang for buck.

The OP series, along with the TP-7, TX-6 are luxury goods. If you’re trying to save money, they’re not for you. They are nice though.

Get your kid a Zynthian instead:

http://zynthian.org/

.. a far better investment, with way more utility for the forward-thinking electronic-music making youngster ..

Thanks for the link !

I would have loved that device in my teens.

In fact reckon I'll buy one for my nephew.

Cheers

Any used Akai device. Depending on how old I would say get them the new standalone device called the mpc one+. If the price is too steep look for a used midi device from Akai.

Honesty, a used cell phone would make a better pocket operator.

I'm always a bit surprised by how much hate fancy, over-engineered products get on here. If you think it is overpriced, don't buy it. Buy the better budget option and let the 'stupid rich idiots' piss away their money on stuff like this.

I just don't get it. Always the negativity.

And if it's all so bad, why not link us to a better product? Why just bitch? Seems like some weird form of jealousy?

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 ..

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.

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.

I would not call a TE product "over engineered".

I think they spend much of their engineering budget on user experience.

I'm not sure if the comments you were referring to were just cleared or something because this seems like a larger overly negative reaction than anything else in this thread. It's okay for a few people to calmly talk about how they think a product is bad, even if you don't get it/agree with it.

I'm not sure there is anything to add beyond the original threads for this though. The price isn't coming from being over engineered though. Some people will like that, others won't. This one probably pushes that boundary more than even most other TE products though.

Happy owner of OB-4 and OD-11 here...

For the ones who feel TE pricing is ridiculous, all you need is function and the experience of using something don't matter much - yeah then TE perhaps is not for you ?

Personally I see my OD-11's doing double duty as sculptures and speakers, bringing me more than just sound waves, most speakers are huge and ugly - these guys ooze 1960's and Kubrick

My OB-4 loop function brings a playful way for me to save loops for my wife to discover, so it's a social object as much as a minimalist boom box ?

To me these are art pieces with a personality and if you ever owned a painting or some jewellery, why should electronics always be about function and price with disdain for aesthetics... ..cables, dust balls and wall warts anyone ?

I sometimes prefer to not have a function if the price is an eye sore.

There's more to life than function.

Bring on the flames ♥

You must be deep into the Apple walled garden.

And you're right, I'll never get it I guess.

I'll spend more on something of equivalent features for only two reasons: build quality and freedom. Alas, most electronics nowadays offer neither, so cheapest it is.

Easily the most overrated company in audio electronics to date.

They make expensive bespoke parts with barely enough features to lure in the punters, who delight in being special while devices 1/3rd the cost do far, far more ..

What utility does the spinning motor bring on this thing?

It helps the hipster justify their investment by differentiating an otherwise normal function found on other devices, with 'applied automation'.

There is no other purpose.

$1499

This one is a bit more ridiculous than the others.

You can get something like a Tascam DR-07XP for $150 and it does 32bit float format with essentially unlimited dynamic range. I will never need to buy another field mic.

A big part of the appeal from TE products is their industrial design. The critics don't get it and talk about cost-benefit, bare minimum features. But the fact is, some people like to have nice, shinny objects. Yeah, spec wise, the Tascam Dr-07xp is absolutely superior to this, but at the same time, it is fucking ugly. For a professional, functionality is more important, but this is an amateur product.

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