Teenage Engineering’s New Handheld Mixer Is Very Pretty, Very Small, and Very Expensive

Teenage Engineering has as soon as once more demonstrated why firms like Panic, creators of the Playdate handheld, often enlist the corporate’s assist to design merchandise for them. The TX-6 is TE’s new handheld, battery-powered mixer, and it is a factor of magnificence. It’s so fairly, in reality, that it’s a disgrace how solely a very small group of cellular music makers will get use out of it.

Best recognized for its line of pocket-friendly digital sequencers, precisely referred to as Pocket Operators, Teenage Engineering made its identify by compact digital devices which can be surprisingly feature-packed regardless of their small footprints. The new TE TX-6 continues that custom of completely balancing kind and performance in a tool that appears smaller in hand than the Nintendo Game Boy.

Packed inside a case created from precision CNC’d aluminum, the TX-6 incorporates a rechargeable battery good for about eight hours of jam up-pumping that powers customized and constructed encoders and faders (given nobody makes elements for a mixer this small). It accepts indicators from as much as six stereo sources utilizing 3.5-millimeter jacks positioned throughout the highest of the system, and might each combine and apply results like reverb, refrain, delay, distortion and even a three-band EQ utilizing three knobs on every channel which can be all fully customizable.

A tiny 48×64-pixel monochromatic show in a single nook of the mixer incorporates a pixelated however simple to navigate person interface for configuring the TX-6, but it surely’s received Bluetooth onboard too, permitting it to wirelessly hook up with and interface with apps as a MIDI controller, or join bodily to different units utilizing a USB-C cable.

Teenage Engineering has even included synthesizer and sequencer performance within the TX-6 with “4 oscillator waveforms and 4 synthesized drum sounds,” though you’re in all probability higher off utilizing the corporate’s different instrumental creations for laying down beats. But what’s most stunning in regards to the TX-6 is its price ticket. At $1,200, obtainable now by the Teenage Engineering website, it’s nearly as costly as the corporate’s much-loved OP-1 portable synth that often sells for $1,300 however is presently offered out. That makes it a troublesome promote for informal musical experimenters like myself who simply wish to fiddle with the TX-6’s beautiful knurled knob, however severe musicians who do their finest work whereas crammed right into a tiny airplane seat will in all probability see extra worth in it.