5 ms·

Once, 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

Once, 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.

sanderjd 5y ago
Don't people do that all the time and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed? Isn't this why we have competitive products and competing price points for most things?
nathanvanfleet 5y ago
Not really a valid argument. Plenty of similar products out there with more competitive prices. "Make this complex product yourself" is the equivalent argument as "if you don't like something with your country just leave." People can complain that something is expensive.
- alfalfasprout 5y ago
  This is a ridiculous equivalence. If you live in a country you don't have a choice but be subject to its laws, politics, etc. You'd have to leave. No one is forcing you to buy this product.
aikinai 5y ago
That’s how Anker got started I believe.
- arkades 5y ago
  My understanding is that anker got started with standard white labed alibaba type goods, but differentiated themselves with good curation, meaning you actually got something decent at a low price
squarefoot 5y ago
No need to try as it already exists: Any Linux tablet with Reaper and a couple soft synths and a decent external sound card if needed would do a lot more for a lot less. A good portion of the cost of this device could be justified only if it really had motorized knobs and faders, which are shown in the video but not mentioned among the features; that would be a completely unnecessary gimmick (in such a device) which however would impact a lot on the cost. Portable music devices aren't that expensive these days. Take a look at what SunVox can do on old hardware, or maybe the Polyend Tracker, which is a hardware solution that costs less than half of the tx-6 and doesn't kill the eyes on a toy display. https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQufJBVvAtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQufJBVvAtY
- abxytg 5y ago
  neither of these are remotely close to the tx-6....
an-unknown 5y ago
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 market" step though, because usually you'll start such a project because you wanted to have a specific mixer/synthesizer/sampler/…, and once you have it on your desk, the next project usually looks more interesting than spending the extra time to sell whatever you just developed.
- IAmPym 5y ago
  As someone who literally does this for a living at Sequential, you couldn't be more wrong
  - javajosh 5y ago
    I don't do this for a living and can't imagine how a statement like "your prototype will be cheaper than commercially available options" could be taken seriously by anyone.
    - eternityforest 5y ago
      If you don't count your time whatsoever and don't go for the nice case design. I mean at the extreme case, if you can tolerate 40ms of latency and stuttering, a Raspberry Pi and some USB soundcards can do it all. The actual power needed is reasonable and ADC/DACs aren't that insane. A Teensy 4.1 connected to an ESP32 could probably do most of this, if you wanted to do $15k of software development in your spare time and were really good at DSP.
      - TheRealPomax 5y ago
        Anyone who can tolerate 40ms of latency should stick to Bluetooth. If it's more than 3ms, it's already more latency than a good RF system gives you, if it's more than 10ms things are getting questionable, and at 20+ms you've lost the ability to monitor, because what your fingers/voice do and what your ears hear are now noticeably out of sync. Try singing while monitoring yourself at 20ms delay. It's hilarious.
dsr_ 5y ago
If you insist on the portable form-factor, it will be slightly troublesome. If it's going to sit on a desk and be used all the time, a Behringer 1222USB is $250 when they aren't running a special sale. It has more channels, some usable effects, and you can add an iPad Mini with some synth software to handle the rest of the functionality. So that's half the price, and you get to play with the iPad whenever you aren't making music; or it's about 1/6 the price of the TX-6 without the synth.
- bombcar 5y ago
  You don’t get the “look” - some people will buy this for the portability but a majority will be using it to fit into a particular look they want. Think YouTube podcast where everything on the desk is sleek and apple or apple-like. This fits in in a way the Behringer doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find YouTube videos with this on the desk but obviously not being used - where the actual dirty work is done offscreen.
joemi 5y ago
What all the people disagreeing with you are ignoring is the work and skill that goes into the product design. It takes a lot of iteration, which means lots of prototypes, which means lots of time and money spent just developing the product. This means iteration on the electronics, the UI, the case, etc etc. Anyone could whip together something that's bigger, uglier, and has a worse user interface, all for less money, but to make something equivalent to what TE makes is a what takes all the time/money/effort/skill. Also most of the disagreers are also ignoring the "bring it to market" step. Even if you built something of equivalent product design as TE, building one for yourself is vastly different than doing a product run where you expect each product to be the same. PCB design and manufacturing is relatively easy and inexpensive, but all the plastic/rubber forming/molding is much trickier and significantly expensive. Getting past the manufacturing aspect, there's the whole marketing, sales, and distribution aspect, which aren't anything to be sneezed at either. Seriously a lot of work goes into bringing a product to market that DIYers building single devices or very tiny runs of devices don't even consider. While TE might not be doing Behringer-level runs of products, their runs are definitely bigger than a lone DIYer could ever handle by themselves. (Note: This isn't to say that TE's products are necessarily better for everyone than something they could make themselves (or buy for less from a different company), of course. After all, the world's musicians got by just fine before this mixer was released. I just wanted to chime in and explain some of reasons why TE's stuff costs more than what you might think you could make yourself.)
rchaud 5y ago
Just say it costs $100/mo for 12 months for on-prem. They'll think it's an exciting new enterprise B2B SaaS.
vvvzxd 5y ago
not understanding this argument. i'm not a synth manufacturer. korg and roland put out plenty of gear with great features for a lower price than this
- incanus77 5y ago
  Well, someone should tell TE then, because they obviously don't know they're making a huge mistake and this will fail miserably.
  - vvvzxd 5y ago
    im sure there are plenty of fools willing to spend the money on this for cool points, doesnt necessarily mean it isnt stupid
elihu 5y ago
Honestly, this thing works pretty well for my use case: https://www.amazon.com/Moukey-MK0149-RD-FR-Ultra-Low-Noise-6-Channel/dp/B08BBXK8CY/ 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.

Once, 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.

sanderjd 5y ago

Don't people do that all the time and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed? Isn't this why we have competitive products and competing price points for most things?

nathanvanfleet 5y ago

Not really a valid argument. Plenty of similar products out there with more competitive prices. "Make this complex product yourself" is the equivalent argument as "if you don't like something with your country just leave." People can complain that something is expensive.

alfalfasprout 5y ago
This is a ridiculous equivalence. If you live in a country you don't have a choice but be subject to its laws, politics, etc. You'd have to leave. No one is forcing you to buy this product.

aikinai 5y ago

That’s how Anker got started I believe.

arkades 5y ago
My understanding is that anker got started with standard white labed alibaba type goods, but differentiated themselves with good curation, meaning you actually got something decent at a low price

squarefoot 5y ago

No need to try as it already exists: Any Linux tablet with Reaper and a couple soft synths and a decent external sound card if needed would do a lot more for a lot less. A good portion of the cost of this device could be justified only if it really had motorized knobs and faders, which are shown in the video but not mentioned among the features; that would be a completely unnecessary gimmick (in such a device) which however would impact a lot on the cost. Portable music devices aren't that expensive these days. Take a look at what SunVox can do on old hardware, or maybe the Polyend Tracker, which is a hardware solution that costs less than half of the tx-6 and doesn't kill the eyes on a toy display. https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://polyend.com/tracker/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQufJBVvAtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQufJBVvAtY

abxytg 5y ago
neither of these are remotely close to the tx-6....

an-unknown 5y ago

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 market" step though, because usually you'll start such a project because you wanted to have a specific mixer/synthesizer/sampler/…, and once you have it on your desk, the next project usually looks more interesting than spending the extra time to sell whatever you just developed.

IAmPym 5y ago
As someone who literally does this for a living at Sequential, you couldn't be more wrong
- javajosh 5y ago
  I don't do this for a living and can't imagine how a statement like "your prototype will be cheaper than commercially available options" could be taken seriously by anyone.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    If you don't count your time whatsoever and don't go for the nice case design. I mean at the extreme case, if you can tolerate 40ms of latency and stuttering, a Raspberry Pi and some USB soundcards can do it all. The actual power needed is reasonable and ADC/DACs aren't that insane. A Teensy 4.1 connected to an ESP32 could probably do most of this, if you wanted to do $15k of software development in your spare time and were really good at DSP.
    - TheRealPomax 5y ago
      Anyone who can tolerate 40ms of latency should stick to Bluetooth. If it's more than 3ms, it's already more latency than a good RF system gives you, if it's more than 10ms things are getting questionable, and at 20+ms you've lost the ability to monitor, because what your fingers/voice do and what your ears hear are now noticeably out of sync. Try singing while monitoring yourself at 20ms delay. It's hilarious.

dsr_ 5y ago

If you insist on the portable form-factor, it will be slightly troublesome. If it's going to sit on a desk and be used all the time, a Behringer 1222USB is $250 when they aren't running a special sale. It has more channels, some usable effects, and you can add an iPad Mini with some synth software to handle the rest of the functionality. So that's half the price, and you get to play with the iPad whenever you aren't making music; or it's about 1/6 the price of the TX-6 without the synth.

bombcar 5y ago
You don’t get the “look” - some people will buy this for the portability but a majority will be using it to fit into a particular look they want. Think YouTube podcast where everything on the desk is sleek and apple or apple-like. This fits in in a way the Behringer doesn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to find YouTube videos with this on the desk but obviously not being used - where the actual dirty work is done offscreen.

joemi 5y ago

What all the people disagreeing with you are ignoring is the work and skill that goes into the product design. It takes a lot of iteration, which means lots of prototypes, which means lots of time and money spent just developing the product. This means iteration on the electronics, the UI, the case, etc etc. Anyone could whip together something that's bigger, uglier, and has a worse user interface, all for less money, but to make something equivalent to what TE makes is a what takes all the time/money/effort/skill. Also most of the disagreers are also ignoring the "bring it to market" step. Even if you built something of equivalent product design as TE, building one for yourself is vastly different than doing a product run where you expect each product to be the same. PCB design and manufacturing is relatively easy and inexpensive, but all the plastic/rubber forming/molding is much trickier and significantly expensive. Getting past the manufacturing aspect, there's the whole marketing, sales, and distribution aspect, which aren't anything to be sneezed at either. Seriously a lot of work goes into bringing a product to market that DIYers building single devices or very tiny runs of devices don't even consider. While TE might not be doing Behringer-level runs of products, their runs are definitely bigger than a lone DIYer could ever handle by themselves. (Note: This isn't to say that TE's products are necessarily better for everyone than something they could make themselves (or buy for less from a different company), of course. After all, the world's musicians got by just fine before this mixer was released. I just wanted to chime in and explain some of reasons why TE's stuff costs more than what you might think you could make yourself.)

rchaud 5y ago

Just say it costs $100/mo for 12 months for on-prem. They'll think it's an exciting new enterprise B2B SaaS.

vvvzxd 5y ago

not understanding this argument. i'm not a synth manufacturer. korg and roland put out plenty of gear with great features for a lower price than this

incanus77 5y ago
Well, someone should tell TE then, because they obviously don't know they're making a huge mistake and this will fail miserably.
- vvvzxd 5y ago
  im sure there are plenty of fools willing to spend the money on this for cool points, doesnt necessarily mean it isnt stupid

elihu 5y ago

Honestly, this thing works pretty well for my use case: https://www.amazon.com/Moukey-MK0149-RD-FR-Ultra-Low-Noise-6-Channel/dp/B08BBXK8CY/ 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.