5 ms·

I wonder why it's so expensive, I know it should be higher than regular consumers expect because it's a low volume high quality product, but so is the OP-1 and

by tinco 5y ago

I wonder why it's so expensive, I know it should be higher than regular consumers expect because it's a low volume high quality product, but so is the OP-1 and that seems to have a lot more manufacturing overhead. Wouldn't this product just contain a small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's? It's small but I think those should fit fine in that enclosure with a thick PCB. Anyone know if there's anything really special in there? Not hating if there isn't, the product is probably worth it to many people regardless, just wondering. edit: just to clear the easiest explanation, since it's even more niche than the OP-1 it needs that much more margin? If it sells 1/10th the quantity it needs 10x the margin maybe.

tpmx 5y ago
It's the mechanics that's expensive. The casing, the beautiful metal knurled knobs, all of the various parts made at very high quality in relatively low numbers.
foobarian 5y ago
Look how beautiful and well-designed it is. This is almost beyond Apple-level taste. I would throw money at this company if I had the inclination to get into this kind of hobby :-) edit: beyond just how it looks and the mechanical properties, I also wonder how much additional value they added during integration. Yes the BOM may sound trivial ("small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's") but IME it's easy to mess this up without a lot of extra attention. Example: my TV is plugged into a DAC which powers standing speakers, and every time I turn it on, there is a discontinuity that blasts a "pop" at maximum volume through the speakers regardless of volume level. Or you could end up with a line level hum if not shielded properly. Etc.
bjt2n3904 5y ago
Small run production with no expense spared of a designer product for niche applications. Expensive expensive expensive! That case looks like it was milled!
- kennywinker 5y ago
  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 only thing even similar I can think of and it’s not that similar (and $699) Edit: someone in another comment pointed out the 1010 music bluebox, which is definitely more similar to this than the kmix, for $549 Edit 2: I just remembered the existence of zoom recorders. The zoom h6 has 6 tracks, is a portable mixer and audio interface, and also includes 2 good microphones and can record without being tethered to another device. It’s about $400. It’s got a different vibe, but it’s also quite beautiful
  - duped 5y ago
    Prosumer audio gadgets are a relatively small market, audio interfaces are a slice of that. Audio interfaces that function as mixers are even smaller. There's been a boon with stream decks the last few years, but the only part of that market that's saturated is the low end. There really are not that many high quality mixers and audio interfaces out there, and they are not really in a small form factor like this. Not to mention the codec shortage. Making a digital audio board right now sucks.
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      I think you might be underestimating the size of the market for audio interfaces and mixers - but that’s just a feeling mostly based on how many of them are on craigslist at any given moment in my city. But either way you can’t deny they’re choosing to go high end. They could have scaled down the software features of this by 10-20%, put it in a less “jony ive” case and sold it for $300-600 - but then they would’ve had more competition.
      - duped 5y ago
        The TAM for pro audio equipment was around $10 billion and growing when I left working in it a few years ago. One of the reasons the market is so terrible for manufacturers is that their own products on the secondary market cannibalize future sales, which puts a damper on demand. It's great for professionals that can afford the high prices and buy stuff that last decades, but not great for an industry that needs to make new sales each year and develop future products. There's always cool stuff to build and develop, don't get me wrong, it's just not worth a ton of money which means that development times are long, prices stay pretty high for the good stuff, and talent is constantly siphoned by other markets (for example: consumer loudspeakers and AR/VR products: Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon have been on hiring sprees for audio hardware/software developers for the last decade) Over the last decade there was a growth in new products, but there's a lot of crap. There was also a lot of consolidation and acquisition because audio hardware manufacturing is such an expensive thing to do for a small market, particularly on the high end.
ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>I wonder why it's so expensive [...] Wouldn't this product just contain a small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's? If tech products should cost the sum of their parts then an iPhone 14 Pro and an RTX 3090 should cost about $300. After all, they're just a PCB with some components on them. You're ignoring the enormous R&D costs (engineering salaries, hardware prototyping, sales, marketing, support, etc.) that must be recouped, while also turning a profit, through the sale of each of these low volume products. Developing consumer hardware in the west aint cheap, that's why most western brands other than Apple, and a few other high-end niche ones, pulled out of the consumer market.
- tinco 5y ago
  I'm not ignoring anything, I'm explicitly not comparing it to consumer hardware in the first line of my comment.
jelling 5y ago
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.
- ng55QPSK 5y ago
  Synths were always expensive. Polyphonic, analog Stuff was clearly in the 5-digit prices. Digitalisation brought this down to 4...5000€.
  - an-unknown 5y ago
    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 outperform modern commercially available modules that cost multiple times more (think of a factor of 10x for the price difference). It's even crazier if you look at digital synthesizers or samplers. Remember the E-MU Emulator from 1981, which cost more than $8000 when it was released? Today, a cheap 5€ microcontroller together with a 2€ DAC will give you more of everything already (more polyphony, more RAM, higher sample rate, more resolution per sample, stereo output instead of mono, …).
    - Applejinx 5y ago
      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. and producing unusually high quality analog stages. It IS possible to do that: I think Make Noise does it very well, and from what little I know about the Teenage Engineering thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they were performing on a very high level even though there's nothing retro about any of it. I'd love to see someone do a seriously overkill Pi DAC/ADC hat. What you're saying is not exactly untrue… just that the people habitually saying these things are also the farthest from being able to MAKE it be as true as they think. The Teenage Engineerings of the world are more likely to be able to deliver the goods.
moralestapia 5y ago
Their business model is basically doing that + envy and fomo. Not criticizing it.
abxytg 5y ago
it has 8 oonboard fx that can be applied to the tracks. drum machine and synth onboard. Multitrack usb audio device.

by tinco 5y ago

tpmx 5y ago

It's the mechanics that's expensive. The casing, the beautiful metal knurled knobs, all of the various parts made at very high quality in relatively low numbers.

foobarian 5y ago

Look how beautiful and well-designed it is. This is almost beyond Apple-level taste. I would throw money at this company if I had the inclination to get into this kind of hobby :-) edit: beyond just how it looks and the mechanical properties, I also wonder how much additional value they added during integration. Yes the BOM may sound trivial ("small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's") but IME it's easy to mess this up without a lot of extra attention. Example: my TV is plugged into a DAC which powers standing speakers, and every time I turn it on, there is a discontinuity that blasts a "pop" at maximum volume through the speakers regardless of volume level. Or you could end up with a line level hum if not shielded properly. Etc.

bjt2n3904 5y ago

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

kennywinker 5y ago
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 only thing even similar I can think of and it’s not that similar (and $699) Edit: someone in another comment pointed out the 1010 music bluebox, which is definitely more similar to this than the kmix, for $549 Edit 2: I just remembered the existence of zoom recorders. The zoom h6 has 6 tracks, is a portable mixer and audio interface, and also includes 2 good microphones and can record without being tethered to another device. It’s about $400. It’s got a different vibe, but it’s also quite beautiful
- duped 5y ago
  Prosumer audio gadgets are a relatively small market, audio interfaces are a slice of that. Audio interfaces that function as mixers are even smaller. There's been a boon with stream decks the last few years, but the only part of that market that's saturated is the low end. There really are not that many high quality mixers and audio interfaces out there, and they are not really in a small form factor like this. Not to mention the codec shortage. Making a digital audio board right now sucks.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    I think you might be underestimating the size of the market for audio interfaces and mixers - but that’s just a feeling mostly based on how many of them are on craigslist at any given moment in my city. But either way you can’t deny they’re choosing to go high end. They could have scaled down the software features of this by 10-20%, put it in a less “jony ive” case and sold it for $300-600 - but then they would’ve had more competition.
    - duped 5y ago
      The TAM for pro audio equipment was around $10 billion and growing when I left working in it a few years ago. One of the reasons the market is so terrible for manufacturers is that their own products on the secondary market cannibalize future sales, which puts a damper on demand. It's great for professionals that can afford the high prices and buy stuff that last decades, but not great for an industry that needs to make new sales each year and develop future products. There's always cool stuff to build and develop, don't get me wrong, it's just not worth a ton of money which means that development times are long, prices stay pretty high for the good stuff, and talent is constantly siphoned by other markets (for example: consumer loudspeakers and AR/VR products: Apple/Google/Facebook/Amazon have been on hiring sprees for audio hardware/software developers for the last decade) Over the last decade there was a growth in new products, but there's a lot of crap. There was also a lot of consolidation and acquisition because audio hardware manufacturing is such an expensive thing to do for a small market, particularly on the high end.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago

>I wonder why it's so expensive [...] Wouldn't this product just contain a small signal processing FPGA, a bunch of ADC's and a couple DAC's? If tech products should cost the sum of their parts then an iPhone 14 Pro and an RTX 3090 should cost about $300. After all, they're just a PCB with some components on them. You're ignoring the enormous R&D costs (engineering salaries, hardware prototyping, sales, marketing, support, etc.) that must be recouped, while also turning a profit, through the sale of each of these low volume products. Developing consumer hardware in the west aint cheap, that's why most western brands other than Apple, and a few other high-end niche ones, pulled out of the consumer market.

tinco 5y ago
I'm not ignoring anything, I'm explicitly not comparing it to consumer hardware in the first line of my comment.

jelling 5y ago

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.

ng55QPSK 5y ago
Synths were always expensive. Polyphonic, analog Stuff was clearly in the 5-digit prices. Digitalisation brought this down to 4...5000€.
- an-unknown 5y ago
  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 outperform modern commercially available modules that cost multiple times more (think of a factor of 10x for the price difference). It's even crazier if you look at digital synthesizers or samplers. Remember the E-MU Emulator from 1981, which cost more than $8000 when it was released? Today, a cheap 5€ microcontroller together with a 2€ DAC will give you more of everything already (more polyphony, more RAM, higher sample rate, more resolution per sample, stereo output instead of mono, …).
  - Applejinx 5y ago
    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. and producing unusually high quality analog stages. It IS possible to do that: I think Make Noise does it very well, and from what little I know about the Teenage Engineering thing, I wouldn't be surprised if they were performing on a very high level even though there's nothing retro about any of it. I'd love to see someone do a seriously overkill Pi DAC/ADC hat. What you're saying is not exactly untrue… just that the people habitually saying these things are also the farthest from being able to MAKE it be as true as they think. The Teenage Engineerings of the world are more likely to be able to deliver the goods.

moralestapia 5y ago

Their business model is basically doing that + envy and fomo. Not criticizing it.

abxytg 5y ago

it has 8 oonboard fx that can be applied to the tracks. drum machine and synth onboard. Multitrack usb audio device.