CMU School of Drama


Friday, April 22, 2022

Beautiful mini audio mixer comes with not-so-attractive price tag

newatlas.com: The masters of minimalist styling at Sweden's Teenage Engineering have added a feature-packed but tiny pro audio mixer to the company's lineup, which packs built-in sounds, beats and sequencing and can also serve as a USB audio interface.

2 comments:

Ethan Johnson said...

I find this piece of technology quite… interesting. It seems to be a small handheld mixer that can be used on the go to run recordings and edit tracks with 6 stereo inputs that can also be used for live digital processing. My main question that I run into here is simple; why? Like, literally just why? I mean sure, it’s a small machine with a decent amount of power so it can be easily transported and quickly set up and broken down, but I feel like there’s so much you are losing out on by sizing a mixer down to 3 INCHES. First, I really struggle with reading small text and this would be absolutely horrendous for me to try and mix on. Second, the 6 inputs are 3.5 mm which is not at all common for most instruments and microphones, making it seem quite the impractical set up, You’d basically have to design an entire set up around this mixer, which is 1200 DOLLARS by the way, a price tag which could easily be used to by baseline digital mixers such as the X32 Producer. I just don’t see the point here, smh.

Nick Huettig said...

I'll take "Innovations that nobody really needed" for $500 please.

Jokes aside, what's the point of this? It's certainly impressive, and managing to pack that many features into such a tiny box, I could see some use for it, but the major problem is the price tag. All of the uses that I can think of for this product (on the fly pop-up band mixing, house party performances, field recording, etc.) could be easily served by something far cheaper. $1200 may sound right for the features this thing provides, but it doesn't really matter if nobody uses it. You could get an 8-channel mixer with roughly the same features on it for about half that price, for just a bit more size. Need to record something? Buy a portable audio recorder for 1/4th of the price.

Also, 3.5mm inputs? Who are you marketing to? Professionals? 3.5mm inputs just killed that. Amateurs/enthusiasts? Maybe, but the price tag is ridiculous for that. People needing an option for their house parties? $1200, no shot. I love the idea of this product, but it just suffers from the problem of "nobody's going to buy this because other products do it better for cheaper".