Just before MusikMesse, Teenage Engineering unleashed their OP-1 MIDI controlling sythesiser FM radio thingy, amid a flurry of OMGs, WTFs and a degree of April Fool based disbelief. Well it is real, and I have pictures and videos to prove it.
So let's get down to what I managed to get out of the warm and friendly teenage engineering team. What you see here is an early prototype, not much more than a mockup in fact. They told me the inspiration was the original Casio VL-Tone (as suspected). It's all Aluminium, giving the unit a sharp edged high quality feel, and runs a custom kernel to run their own apps in (no Linux here I'm afraid). They did however say that while they don't plan to make it into an open architecture for user apps, that doesn't mean it isn't hackable, so we might see some cool user generated stuff appearing.
The screen is very nice indeed - bright and clear. The colour is especially vibrant, making me want to see some more raster based graphics as well as vector ones, but I suppose that's down to the processing power of the OP-1 really.
One of my comments when I first saw this was that I felt it was doing too much and perhaps wasn't as focussed as it could be. To back this up, I asked about being an audio/video player, to which the response was no. Very disappointing for me, especially as this is designed to be a portable musician's tool/plaything and being able to have it as part of your live set could be incredibly useful. I can't fathom out how an FM radio is seen as useful, but an MP3 player isn't. Perhaps it's the lack of storage facilities in the unit. I'm quite sure that an SD slot can't be too hard to put in this thing, especially given the 600-700 euro price tag.
So while the availability isn't until later in the year, this will be on shelves within a year. Speaking to a few people who had seen it, they were quite impressed with the little unit and didn't flinch at the price either. I would however urge Teenage Engineering to ditch the FM radio, get an SD or mini SD card in there and let us use our music and video with the OP-1. And then you'll be able to graft the synth and music player app together for freaky effects madness.
Just an idea guys.
And can we get one in Black too?
4 comments to this story
On April 5, 2009, imfromthafutur commented...
it'd be nice to record samples from the radio.
On April 23, 2009, ursa major commented...
This is maybe one of the best midi controllers I've seen, so simple and elegant its what I've been waiting for especially with a oLED screen making it light on power consumption and nice vibrant colors. The engineers are brilliant and I would expect top quality from these guys.
No one has any idea when this will hit the market eh?
The guys told me it would be definitely be out before next year's Messe show.
On July 26, 2010, Inofaith commented...
I think the FM radio is meant to be sampled, as we alls the built-in mic and the line-in.
I see this as the ultimate tool to take on the road to quickly try out ideas whenever you don't have a laptop with ableton at hand. For midicontrol i don't really see the use.
And why would you want this thing to play video??? It's like having ableton's operator, a minidisc/memo recorder, an mpc, and a synth in a box the size of a casio keyboard. plus it has tape.
Only thing that bothers me is the price tag,... its quite hard to use this "casually" in the bus/train/metro with that kind of value.
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On April 5, 2009, imfromthafutur commented...
4 comments to this story