#41

I like it and don’t have a problem with it. I think unfortunately for TE a lot of the commentary around them now comes from synth nerds, a lot of whom have expectations around what their products should be and how much they should cost.

I’ll agree that the cases are ridiculous, but the item itself I find endearing - and TE do have precedence for this, such as their Carlson speaker. If the IKEA stuff is the cheaper tacky stuff, then this is a luxury option.

I think the rationale behind the device is very charming, putting a focus on FM, ways of remix and in effect a hi-fi Buddha Machine. The old handle radio in the shed was very common when I was younger, this looks like a great product for soundscape interpretation and who knows, perhaps even sound generation.

People are so quick to wipe it out without having seen it or used it, but I don’t know. It could be a very nice speaker to have on the road. I’m interested to see what it is like in person. And I appreciate some of the sentiments you can read in the Engadget review, about their approach to listening and FM, I kinda like this machine generates sound but isn’t a screen, a subscription service, etc. who knows, this could actually wind up a very dear sonic companion to many. Time will tell

8 Likes
#42

To come back to that, I read that a lot, that somehow TE doesn’t “owe us” anything, and they sure don’t. But that’s not what most people are complaining about at least on lines. I think what strikes me is they owe it to THEMSELVES and their arguments and their marketting, if you’re claiming something, you at least owe it to yourself to meet that claim. Now we can go full blown extreme relativism and think hey, maybe they actually met their claim that this is magical and required 6 years of hard work and that they’re a super company with everyone’s good in mind and not at all a little cynical and possibly making hyped low-poly furniture for deep wallets people who really care a lot about being the coolest of the cool kids at their next party or whatever and can back that up with a few hundred dollars, but then what we just say is “anything could be anything to anyone and all words are relative to whoever spoke them so we shouldn’t blame anyone ever for saying anything” and it doesn’t get us very far.

BUT, since, despite what I just said, I don’t think this is a super interesting conversation either, and more importantly I feel like I’ve seen it before here, I wanted to have a thought on the product itself.

I don’t care at all for it and see no interest (and I wasn’t hyped by a new TE product before actually seeing a product so I don’t feel disappointed because I wasn’t expecting anything and we should wonder how weird it is that we get excited about an announcement with nothing being actually anounced) but it made me wonder : Is there a similar endeavor going on for an actual MICROPHONE version of this concept ? I would definitely like to have a Handheld recorder that always records, is good looking enough that I forget about it (something like this https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1140/5964/products/mikme_VYH8221_V1_AdobeRGBEDIT_WEB_grande.jpg?v=1595844970 ) and that always have a buffer of the 2 last hours, with a long enough battery life that I can just charge it every now and then and that’s it. That would be very nice and I sooo often felt like “Ah ! that sound at my window, wish I had my recorder on at that moment !”.

So maybe this is a product that exist already and I don’t know about it ? If so please point me in the right direction.

11 Likes
#43

To be fair, though (and I was one of the many people who mentioned that it was sold out), we don’t what “sold out” means. It could have been single-digit units sold out to further the hype they worked to build.

4 Likes
#44

Yooooooo, I WANT THIS SO BAD, holy crap.

9 Likes
#45

This is emphasizes why I feel the worship of industrial design (dieter rams, jony ive) is silly the point of becoming poisonous. How it could it more plain in this instance, the worship of design is just the worship of capitalism/commodity fetishism. TE are simply in the business of making money, that’s how it works once you’ve balloon up. I feel like they could release a Rick and Morty pickle and it would sell out instantly like the ob-4 as long as it was minimalist and tactically inspired (oh wait)

25 Likes
#46

On the one hand, this meets a use case I encounter daily: nonce ambient while doing kitchen chores. I can totally see just having this on the counter, finding something on the radio worth slowing, and then turning that into a drone while I putter. It’s kind of a nicely packaged tape-music lab.

On the other hand, I already do exactly this with my ipad, so say nothing about what most of us here can do with other tools to the same end.

The product is neat, but not neat enough for me to spend that much on it, or to bring one more battery powered item of future cruft into our house.

#47

image

:rofl:

10 Likes
#48

The abundance of consumer choice obfuscates the fact that we are not free in any way.

16 Likes
#49

for real, @LLK ironically you are really selling me getting this thing and hooking up my field recorder on the line in. guess it would depend on if there is any disk mode for it (since they didn’t include a line out :joy:)

they’re building a 15 story mixed use building next door to me and it is really, really annoying being woken up by hammers every day at 7am, but i do find myself hearing the hammers as a sound installation sometimes, and sometimes the workers do cheers or sing and it really feels like a community…

there is probably a norns app idea in this (if it hasn’t already been built, i am getting a heavy sense of deja vu)

4 Likes
#50

This is reductionist to a detrimental degree. Design is a study on how we function with the world. The line between the human and our relationship to our tools. Just as architecture is the study and comment on how human’s interact with the space in which we move/exist. These are not always “capitalist” and neither is the act of designing said object. It is a reality of being a modern human. No matter the economic system in which we live.

As for TE’s relationship to all of this; (the preverbal) we get excited at the idea of a product more neatly fitting in to our lives. Good designers do this. And TE has shown themselves to previously have functioned in that way. Making money is obviously the name of the game, they can continue to function if they generate revenue…

All in all, lets not just denigrate the value of design. It is integral to our lives and those who do it best should absolutely be held in high regard. Again, in respect to monome since they are related to this thread; They design products that meet us where we stand. The build them to last. They build them timeless. I have a grid from 10 years ago that still looks and functions the day I got it and I love it. That’s good design.

7 Likes
#51

I have two… issues? concerns? problems? …with the OB-4.

First, I’m old enough to remember when radio was, along with newspapers, the main place to get information. As that role has changed, with the advent of television and now, of course, the internet, so has my perspective on where the radio fits in with life as I live it now. I like to listen to the radio as I get up and potter about in the morning, but these days it’s as much for the company (half-listening to familiar voices droning quietly in the background is quite soothing, I find) as it is for news-gathering or entertainment. And my current elderly Sony DAB radio meets those needs very well; as/when it passes on to silicon heaven, I’m not sure I would want to splurge £600 on a device whose functionality I could probably get for maybe 5% of that price.

Second, having only recently come back to making music after many years away, it’s impossible not to notice how much the landscape has changed. My old home studio had an Atari computer with a big old CRT monitor, a 5-octave Yamaha workstation keyboard, 16:8:2 mixer, 8-track reel-to-reel - you know the story. It was huge, took up the whole spare room. I’d seen/heard about the OP-1 in its early days and was so impressed at how much it could do with such a small form factor. And it looked amazing, too. Proper cutting edge technology, at the time. I ended up with an OP-Z, which I’ve rarely used because I find its interface and workflow inscrutable/impenetrable but - along with the OP-1 - I still feel it is something of a design classic. Time will tell if either the OP-1 or OP-Z become regarded as timeless designs, in the same way as, for example, a Citroen 2CV, or a Stradivarius violin, but my point is that TE have produced at least two strong contenders for the title. Form follows function, to steal a phrase from architecture, and TE have done it remarkably well with the OPs.

I guess I was at least curious to see what they’d come up with this time - but a radio? I dunno, I’ve got some disconnect in my head about this and right now I’m just trying to figure that out. I don’t think the OB-4 is inherently “bad” or any of the subjective terms I’ve seen in reactions to it, both here and elsewhere. Maybe I just didn’t realise that I had any expectations beyond it being some sort of playable instrument, not a device you use in such a passive way.

Interesting…

2 Likes
#52

Is there a similar endeavor going on for an actual MICROPHONE version of this concept ? I would definitely like to have a Handheld recorder that always records, is good looking enough that I forget about it (something like this https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1140/5964/products/mikme_VYH8221_V1_AdobeRGBEDIT_WEB_grande.jpg?v=1595844970 ) and that always have a buffer of the 2 last hours, with a long enough battery life that I can just charge it every now and then and that’s it. That would be very nice and I sooo often felt like “Ah ! that sound at my window, wish I had my recorder on at that moment !”.

You may want to check out this portable microphone / mobile recorder that’s currently being crowdfunded. Early bird deals are still available. It’s from the Soyuz Microphones people, who ordinarily make high-end, boutique microphones for pro audio professionals (think $2-4k), but this is their first consumer-oriented product. It does a lot of things I’ve been looking for a single small device to do, and it does them while being rather attractive (in my eyes, anyway). They claim up to 12 hours of continuous recording with the internal rechargeable battery and internal storage (8gb). Burr Brown op amps, USB-C bidirectional audio, line in and line out, includes a built-in mic stand, and with a button press you can engage the noise reduction algorithm from Klevgrand’s Brusfri plugin. All for early bird pricing of $159. That’s the kind of value, design, and personal creative proposition I respond to enthusiastically - not a gratuitous art object for rich people to show off to their friends (no slight against art objects, I’ll just always need mine to be deeply justified on a functional level, growing up somewhat poor imprinted that upon me).

5 Likes
#53

If what I wrote comes off as reductionist, then I achieved what I was trying to do. I spent four years in design school studying architecture and left specifically because I felt there was no way to express anything in that form without it becoming distorted by the influence of capitalist ideology. Luxury goods like the ob-4 epitomize this.

22 Likes
#54

ohno
ohno1480×880 164 KB

18 Likes
#55

I sometimes wonder if TE have given their “all” to the music making community. They have their synth, and sequencer. I wonder if they view those as complete and never to be improved upon and so move on to pastures new.

Whilst I dont see the OP-Z as a classic, the OP-1 almost certainly is/will be. Perhaps TE view both as definitive.

2 Likes
#56

Completely agree with critiques etc, but honestly - I do like the idea that they are playing with their company. It’s hard to make a company, and hard to achieve a following. They can do what they like with theirs.

I won’t say I love all their choices, but I much prefer watching their play to remembering any of my time in corporate land where the goal is to brainwash everyone into submission / purchase. We don’t complain (hopefully) when a musician releases an album that takes them away from the nest; we should celebrate that.

Being a consumer of electronics is an optional activity so it seems to me that the most intense flavour of criticism should be garden variety bemusement. Just walk on by…

6 Likes
#57

So while I agree with most of the critical voices in that thread, and I surely won’t be buying it (it is insanely priced for someone from Poland and I have been bitten by TE low build quality few times in the past and would rather see limited earth resources used to making something more reliable) one of the cool use cases I could see with this product is if they would create a FM transmitter module for OP-Z then you could play wirelessly with very low latency, but on the other hand I guess there are already dongles for that which are probably 1/20th of a OB-4 price.

2 Likes
#58

I feel much the same way about TE. It’s hard to argue with the brilliance of the OP-1, even if you don’t totally gel with it (I didn’t). But this move feels like they’re trying to become a consumer electronics company, and foregoing their roots and the innovation that made them what they are.

Personally, I was hoping the reveal would be an oplab 2, something I missed when it was in production and have always wanted since then.

#59

i actually would have loved a little handheld buddha box sized version of this for headphones w/ the wheel and all.

8 Likes
#60

The disconnect here is the OB-4 is a luxury consumer electronics product aimed at an elite class of consumer, and a lot of the people on the receiving end of the marketing campaign are electronic musicians. I think TE has been moving in the direction of becoming a luxury goods company rather than electronic instrument makers–even if those domains intersect to some point.

“…designed to be played outdoors, in public spaces and at high volume; carried on one shoulder with speaker elements facing the head. note: it is assumed that passers-by share the same musical taste…”

The above statement smacks of odious privilege more than youthful rebelliousness, and the lack of any protection for the speaker cones is just as telling about class. Why does a $49.99 Eneby bluetooth speaker come with a grill, but the $600 OB-4 doesn’t have the option of something similar? The answer is because someone shopping at Ikea needs their products to last for several years. The OB-4 consumer can afford to laugh it off when their friend puts an elbow through a speaker cone in the park.

Still, in a world of fresh outrages daily–the OB4 ranks rather low. This disk mode might turn out to be interesting if they put a little more emphasis on experimental rather than lifestyle.

8 Likes