TE is known for its beautiful design, and for squeezing weird but excellent innovations into its products. Up until now its music machines have been synthesizers and speakers, but the new TX-6 is a pocket-sized mixer and audio interface. The most obvious features are its size, and its amazing looks, but this unit is unique for many other reasons. It is also quite flawed. Oh, and it costs $1,199. “The TX-6 is perfect for what I’m aiming for. It replaces the need to get a few different machines that basically added up to around $1096. It’s nice to have all of them in one, even if I never use the synth or drums,” said electronic musician Nathan Beta on the Elektronauts music forum.
Teenage Fan Club
The TX-6 is a six-channel mixer and audio interface with built-in effects, a rechargeable battery, and a whole bunch of neat extras. For instance, it also has a sequencer and synthesizer, plus Bluetooth for controlling it from other devices. It even has a DJ mixer mode, where you run it on its side and use one of those faders as a crossfader between two inputs. But the main part, and the bit that is getting electronic musicians excited despite the frankly absurd price, is the basic mixer functionality. Most mixers are big and have a whole section dedicated to hooking up microphones or instruments like guitars. These mono channels are often useless for electronic music because you usually want to hook up a bunch of stereo drum machines, synths, and samplers. And those mixers which do offer enough stereo inputs often need to be controlled with a computer instead of by knobs and dials on the front, which is a lot easier to do while playing. Add an audio interface that routes each stereo channel (itself a rarity) into your computer over USB, battery power, and a rock-solid aluminum body, and you can see why people are interested.
Dance Flaw
But then the problems begin. First, there are speculative worries. Teenage Engineering’s two synthesizers, the OP-1 and OP-Z, both buzz when you try to connect them to other devices via USB and audio cables simultaneously. That’s not a good precedent for a USB audio mixer. And then there’s the biggest—or smallest— problem: the size. A tiny unit is fine, but this thing is so small it hurts usability. For starters, those knobs are tiny. Really tiny and really close together, making accurate settings difficult. Given that the whole point of physical knobs is that they’re easy and accurate, this is another fundamental flaw. And then we come to the most embarrassing design oddity. Most pro audio gear uses quarter-inch jacks to connect, and not just one of them, either—you need one for the left and one for the right channel. The TX-6 uses tiny 3.5mm jacks, the same we use for headphones. And that, too, is fine. Adapters exist, and while 3.5mm jacks tend to break way faster than quarter-inch jacks, maybe TE has built them to last. The problem is that most 3.5mm jack cables won’t fit. The jack sockets on the TX-6 are so close together you have to use special, extra narrow cables to even plug them in. And those are another $10-$15 depending on which kind you buy, adding even more to the cost of using this device. “I think the dealbreaker for me is going to be the cables. If I could plug in any old quarter-inch Y to 3.5mm TRS cable for each channel, that would be one thing,” said electronic musician, Presteign in a forum thread. “But due to the spacing of the jacks, it looks like I’d need to spend an additional $90 to get six of these, each of which is barely long enough to reach halfway across a small desk, so then we’re talking two extension cables for each instrument…”
Still Great
But despite (or maybe because of) all this nonsense, the TX-6 is classic Teenage Engineering—beautiful, quirky, unexpected, and flawed, but so smartly designed that people just love it. I feel the same way about TE’s OP-Z synth. Yes, it’s too expensive, and yes, it’s too small, but if it does what it’s supposed to do, it will be a hit. Correction 4/25/22: Fixed the second Key Takeaway to match the actual price from the Teenage Engineering website.
