Tag Archives: teenage engineering

Teenage Engineering creates wooden dolls that’ll sing you lullabies in enchanting choir

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Teenage Engineering and its out-of-the-box custom creations keep everyone on their toes every once in a while. What comes next from the Swedish consumer electronics company is impossible to predict, and their new make is nothing different.

Just in time for the holiday season, they’ve crafted a wooden choir that’ll brighten up your Christmas, if it seemed too boring lately. The choir is inspired by the company’s very first project, the Absolut Choir which debuted in 2007 as a set of 22 wooden dolls.

Designer: Teenage Engineering

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The eight-piece ensemble of dolls sings out preset festive tracks like the Deck The Halls and Auld Lang Syne. Also, your own compositions via the company’s OP-1 Field, OP-Z, or any Bluetooth MIDI keyboard are playable which is audacious. Each of these eight dolls has its own voice and vocal pitch for a unique listening experience. They can sing in chorus or solo (they all have built-in speakers) depending on the listeners’ mood and the occasion.

I can instantly imagine these wooden dolls – Gisela (mezzo soprano), Leila (soprano), Miki (tenor), Bogdan (bass), Hatshepsut (mezzo soprano), Ivana (alto), and Carlo (baritone) – as the centerpiece of a living room shelf or work from home desktop setup. They are all designed based on the different cultures and characters from around the world which makes them special in their own rights.

The dolls handcrafted out of solid Beech wood have unique personalities, given the different looks and voice modulation. What’s most intriguing is the ability to trigger their performance by tapping on the head or even a light tap on the table. Tilting the doll left or right decreases or increases the audio volume courtesy of the embedded accelerometers. Teenage Engineering just like all times, in their quirky style, express these dolls as an interactive gadget that can be given a “little smack to turn it off” when it gets too annoying!

The dolls are individually rechargeable with four hours of performance time which is not bad at all. These are more of an art project for creative people to appreciate but at a steep price tag. Each one of them will set you back $249, and owning all of them will cost close to $2000. But then, what’s money for someone who wants to go any length to show off a wonderful piece as a conversation starter for the festivities?

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Teenage Engineering’s latest gizmo is a turntable designed for children to record and produce vinyls on

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You can be a hipster, but you’ll never be a ‘five-year-old recording on vinyls’ hipster.

Well, it’s official. Teenage Engineering may just be the coolest, most inventive company out there in the tech space. Not only have they given us some incredibly uplifting audio gadgets from their own hardware brand, the company’s also collaborated with brands like IKEA and Nothing to create new products that marry fun and functionality in unique new ways. Teenage Engineering’s latest product, however, expands to a demographic that audio tech never really considered – kids. The PO-80 Record Factory Kit is a record cutter that engraves audio onto 5″ vinyl discs, giving kids the ability to record their own LPs the old-fashioned way, quite like how millennials made mixtapes and burned their own CDs. The Record Factory, created in collaboration with Yuri Suzuki, lets you engrave and playback 5″ discs with an ultra-analog lo-fi sound. This isn’t studio-grade equipment, after all, but it does add a creamy muffled, effect to your audio that totally sounds like the 40s and 50s in a nutshell.

Designers: Teenage Engineering & Yuri Suzuki

Starting at $149 USD, the Record Factory is just simply perfect for kids to experiment and play with. It allows you to plug an audio source in using the 3.5mm input, and lets you engrave any audio directly onto the vinyl disc. The toyish little record cutter turns any audio into a pleasant lo-fi tune with a retro warmth, and Teenage Engineering also supplies a vinyl mastering app on their website that takes your MP3 and WAV files and plays with the equalizer settings to ensure your track is record-ready. The 3.5mm jack also lets you connect the company’s Pocket Operator series of MIDI controllers directly to the cutter, converting the audio you play on the devices into LPs. Alternatively, you could even listen to records using a separate player head and the Record Factory’s built-in speaker.

A perfectly adorable little toy, the Record Factory has pretty much universal appeal. Even though the device is designed for kids in their pre-teen years (a little ironic given the company is literally named Teenage Engineering), its lovely design and easy-to-use interface make it perfect for anyone looking to experiment with audio hardware without breaking the bank.

The Record Factory starts at $149 and comes unassembled, so you’ll definitely enjoy the DIY process of building the device out of the box!

The Record Factory also works with Teenage Engineering’s Pocket Operator devices

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Teenage Engineering BD-1 TWS Earbuds Concept

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It may look a little odd at first glance, but it captures the Teenage Engineering design language perfectly – Nerdy + Nordic. Meet the BD-1, a conceptual pair of TWS earbuds modeled on the company’s OP-1 synthesizer. The OP-1 synth became a pop culture design icon when it was used in Swedish House Mafia’s first music video, One. It sported a form factor that was sleek yet fun, retro yet new, and predominantly clean-looking without being boring. The BD-1 follows similar design cues by being relatively boxy, white, and use colorful ear-tips that match the colors used on the OP-1 synth. The best part? The earbuds case comes with a tiny AMOLED display that mimics the one found on the OP-1, displaying visualizations that react to the music you’re listening to!

Designer: Haechan Ryu

The BD-1 aren’t your average pair of earphones. They’re designed to look different, feel different, and be different. Made for audiophiles and people who appreciate nerdy audio gear, the BD-1 comes with a display on the front that sports visualizations, displays the name of the audio track you’re listening to, and even gives you battery stats (and also a date window, just for good measure).

The earphones sit within the clunky case, with an oddly appealing Star Wars-ish sci-fi design (I guess we’re looking at peak nerd). The earphones and case both use a combination of white plastic and metal to evoke this aesthetic that’s sort of comfortable and refreshing at the same time, and the colored ear-tips provide just the right splash of vibrancy to the design.

Just like the OP-1 synth, the BD-1 uses red, yellow, blue, and green color accents to stand out. In this case, the accents manifest themselves in the ear-tips as well as the BD-1’s USB-C charging cable. Each BD-1 comes with its own charging cable (which is more than what I can say for most smartphones these days). The cables even come with partial coiling as a hat-tip to the coiled wires used by most musicians and audio engineers.

Although Teenage Engineering hasn’t released any TWS Earbuds (yet), the audio-tech company did partner with Nothing over the design of the ear (1) earphones. However, those earphones were arguably designed keeping Nothing’s brand language in mind, with a focus on transparency. The BD-1 TWS earbuds aren’t transparent, but they’re unapologetically Teenage Engineering. They’re edgy, compact, fun, functional, and nothing like anything you’ve seen before. It’s a shame these ones are conceptual, though. I, for one, would really like to see earbuds with AMOLED displays built into their charging cases!

This is a fan-made concept and isn’t affiliated with Teenage Engineering. Any use of the Teenage Engineering brand and logo is for representational purposes only.

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Teenage Engineering’s custom designed performance deck for Swedish House Mafia resembles a spaceship cockpit

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Swedish House Mafia has once again made a thumping comeback in their musical journey with their latest album “Paradise Again” and now they have a custom performance deck to match the laurels.

Teenage Engineering is renowned in the custom builds’ world for their niche creations, and now for the Swedish House Mafia’s 2022 Coachella set and the respective United States and Europe tours, the Swedish consumer electronics manufacturer (known for its OP-1 portable synthesizer) has created the MOAD (The Mother of All Desks). The custom design is a wide canvas for the music group to play with as they make the crowd go crazy at the live performances.

Designer: Teenage Engineering

The two go a long way back when SHM approached Teenage Engineering after the launch of OP-1 for the music video “one”, feat. Pharell Williams. A decade has gone along and the two have again collaborated for this amazing creation. To be honest, the rig is rightly expressed as the mother of them all. MOAD is 5 meters in length and 1.2 meters in width – with the ability to disintegrate into nine separate parts in under 30 minutes. According to Teenage Engineering, they were aided by long-term friend Daniel Araya (who’s an engineer) in constructing the deck.

So, what does this over-stretched deck hold for the music composers to exploit? Well, it’s got multiple mixers, a computer, DJ decks, effect processors, customized light effects, mechanical tape reels, and of course sequencers and samplers. By the look of it (Teenage Engineering doesn’t detail the specs) the master computer here looks to be running Native Instruments Traktor or the Ableton Live software.

While SHM is the lucky one to exploit their mixing skills on the MOAD, other DJs on the planet would be licking their lips, already imagining the tunes they’ll be churning up on this monster canvas!

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The Teenage Engineering TX-6 is a powerful handheld mixer that’s perfect for podcast production

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With a body that’s about as small as a Game Boy, the TX-6 inputs as many as 6 audio channels, letting you expertly manage your audio without needing one of those massive, clunky studio mixing rigs. It also comes with Teenage Engineering’s classic ‘industrial-pop’ design language.

When Teenage Engineering isn’t partnering with IKEA to design speaker systems, Nothing to design TWS earbuds, and Panicto design handheld gaming consoles, they get enough time to themselves to design their own hardware. The TX-6 is yet another handheld little affair from the Swedish company, following their Pocket Operators – a set of minimally designed handheld audio interfaces and synths. The TX-6 feels like a more fleshed-out product though, designed for musicians, deejays, and podcasters. The tiny handheld mixer runs on a battery, and lets you manage up to 6 audio sources while also toggling effects between them. In the right hands, the TX-6 has the potential to be an absolute beast, scaling down an entire studio to something that fits in the palm of your hand.

Designer: Teenage Engineering

The device has a breathtakingly minimalist appeal, with a machined aluminum body that feels wonderfully well-built and cold to the touch, and a PU leather base that prevents your TX-6 from sliding around while you mix away. Overall, it weighs a mere 160 grams (or 5.6 ounces) and has an abundance of 3.5mm audio ports, for inputs, outputs, monitoring, etc. Each of the 6 channels has 3 parameter knobs, a volume fader, an LED level meter, and a track button, while along the side, the TX-6 also manages to fit a tiny LED display, a toggle+selection knob, two effect buttons, and a shift button. You can hook the TX-6 to an external speaker or a pair of headphones for monitoring, and there’s a 1/4-inch master-out port at the base that also comes with its own 3.5mm audio adapter. Finally, a USB-C port on the top lets you hook the TX-6 to a laptop/tablet/smartphone for mutli-channel audio, MIDI control, and for installing firmware updates. The USB-C port also lets you charge the TX-6, which runs for 8 hours on a full charge – long enough for even the longest podcast episodes!

If all that wasn’t impressive enough, the TX-6 also borrows from its Pocket Operator ancestors, by packing a portable synth with 4  oscillator waveforms and 4 synthesized drum sounds built-in, along with 8 effects that include reverb, chorus + delay, freeze, tape, filter, and distortion. Each of the 6 channels also packs a three-band eq and adjustable compressor. Tired of dealing with too many peripherals and wires? The TX-6 is even equipped with Bluetooth connectivity, letting you wirelessly manage your audio (although it feels like there’s bound to be a tiny bit of input lag on a wireless connection)

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Teenage Engineering’s Computer-1 Mini-ITX Chassis shows off how a PC can look awesome

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Teenage Engineering Computer–1 Release

Don’t be fooled by the name of the team behind this gorgeous computer case. The Computer-1 is no youngster when it comes to power. The choice of color alone is bold which tells us Teenage Engineering is one brave company.

The new Computer-1 case is simply a computer chassis that offers a small footprint. It’s compact and portable so you can easily transport your machine and move it to different locations. It’s just a PC case which means you need to build your desktop computer from scratch. This is not for people who don’t care much for their computers. The Computer-1 is aimed at those who like customized PCs and not the generic ones available in most stores.

Designer: Teenage Engineering

Teenage Engineering Computer–1

Before the final design is reached, the design team had gone through several changes. They started by using a laser cutter to cut through a high-density board and spray-painted the case. The handles could not support the weight so they tried to use aluminum for the case and chrome for the handles. The result was a sturdier but lighter design at only 6.69 x 7.48 x 12.67-inches (dimension).

You only need a very small GPU so it could fit. It’s unclear though why the GPU’s location is not at the bottom which is the usual position. One problem we see is airflow but we’re assuming there is a workaround.

Teenage Engineering Computer–1 Chassis

This Computer-1 is built around the SFX power supply format and a mini-ITX motherboard. It can fit a dual-slot graphics card (170mm max) and other parts that are important to almost every kind of computer user whether a game, designer, engineer, or programmer. The system features a flat pack design and is only 1mm aluminum thin.

Teenage Engineering Computer–1 Colors

This PC case requires some tools to assemble. They will come in a special kit when you buy a Computer-1 case. Its $195 price tag makes us think it is a worthy investment especially if you’re planning to build a mega computer machine but we believe there are less inexpensive options.

Teenage Engineering Computer–1 Launch

Many will probably say this reminds them of the Mac Pro. It looks a bit like it with the handles and the holes that act as air vents but you can make the Computer-1 more powerful as you like with the custom hardware and components. You don’t need to be an expert as the computer case can be assembled easily like most products from Ikea.

So this is another DIY system? It’s better to call it build-your-own. You’re not just building the computer case. You’re also building the computer itself with the components and all. We can imagine now the power your computer system housed in Computer-1  can be.

Teenage Engineering Computer–1 Features

Teenage Engineering Computer–1 Specs

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Carl Pei’s Nothing debuts its first product – a pair of TWS earbuds with a ‘zero-secrets’ transparent design

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There was a time when you could take a screwdriver and practically fix anything. A radio, a telephone, a washing machine, all you’d need was a simple tool to help you inspect, replace, and repair parts and your product was good as new, but that isn’t the case today. Try venturing a guess on what’s really inside your smartphone, or how your TWS earbuds work, and the regular consumer will probably draw a massive blank. We take these complex products for granted because they do their job without a fuss, but without even really knowing how beautifully complicated they are on the inside. Nothing, former OnePlus founder Carl Pei’s latest venture, is lifting the veil on products with its brand of minimalist ‘nothingness’. The ear (1) marks Nothing’s debut in the product space and comes with a rather alluring transparent design. The earphones sport a transparent housing that lets you really appreciate the design and detail gone into the product’s inner assemblies, and a transparent case accentuates the brand’s ethos… of being a breath of fresh air in a saturated tech space that’s all about making black and white boxes.

Partnering with Teenage Engineering over the design of the ear (1), Nothing highlights the fact that the design’s beauty lies in ints inherent rawness. “Nothing like you’ve seen before, the raw beauty of ear (1)’s stripped-down aesthetic features transparency to expose the engineering, including microphones, magnets, and circuit board. Everything that is ear (1) is there with purpose”, the brand mentions in a press release.

The earphones boast a massive 11.6mm audio driver, tuned to perfection by the folks at Teenage Engineering, who have established themselves as one of the leading audio-tech brands of our time. The audiophiles at Teenage Engineering painstakingly dialed in the software and hardware for balanced bass, mid, and treble performance, and equipped the TWS earbuds with Bluetooth 5.2 for incredible connectivity.

The earbuds sit rather tightly in your ear thanks to liquid silicone ear-tips, and are even equipped with ANC – a feature that’s definitely worth praise given the TWS earbuds’ $99 price tag. The ANC can be controlled with different modes – like a Light mode for moderate cancelation in a relatively noise-free setting, and a Maximum mode for much noisier environments like in the outdoors, or in public transport. A Transparency mode lets you easily listen to the world around you when you’re walking down roads or you need to pay attention to your surroundings, and the ear (1)’s built-in Clear Voice Technology dramatically reduces distractive background noise, like the wind.

Yet another noteworthy feature is the earbud’s battery life – a cumulative 34 hours, along with the charging case. I’ll admit, there’s definitely an allure to being able to see the earbuds inside their case – it’s almost like a work of art… and you’ve got to admire the way every single element in the earphones is visible, including the magnets that cause the buds to align inside the case. The transparency does trigger a human response to think that the earbuds are fragile, but Nothing ensures that they’re built to a world-class standard. They come sweat and water-resistant, and each earbud weighs a stunningly low 4.7 grams. The case charges wirelessly too, and is Qi-compatible.

The launch of Nothing’s ear (1) quite mirrors how OnePlus established itself as a brand. When OnePlus launched its first phone, it capitalized on crowd fanfare brought about by an alluring design, an extremely competitive price, and a highly limited edition drop that had the crowd begging for more. Nothing seems to be employing a similar strategy too, given its rather eye-catching transparent design and transparently low price. The TWS earbuds will also be available via limited drops on their website nothing.tech. Open sales will begin on 17 August 2021 across 45 countries and regions, including the UK, USA, and Canada.

Designer: Teenage Engineering and Nothing

ICYMI: We take Yamaha’s new digital saxophone for a spin

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This week our reviews were largely focused on unique audio devices, including a "magic radio" and a digital saxophone. James Trew tried out the Vlogger Kit from Rode and quickly became a fan of the microphone, the light cube and the windscr...