hello all- finally got my unit in the mail today!
i have to say, this is one of the most premium pieces of gear that i own. i’m not going to get into the whole debate about price, but from a strictly objective point of view this is built extremely beautifully!!! i guess the main body is plastic… but its hard to describe how nice it feels, metal handle, just every last detail really really well done. i was pretty blown away from it just as a pure object.
then, the sound is very nice- again, i’m happy with it in regards to my purchase. its not the loudest speaker i own of that size, but i’m a bit of a portable speaker snob since i use them all the time in my work. its always almost impossible to communicate how loud something actually is unless you hear it in person. i’ll say that i don’t feel comfortable turning up the volume more than half way for fear of hurting my ears in a medium sized room. so yeah, its loud. and the sound quality is really crisp and sharp. no distortion on what i’ve heard so far, but i haven’t really tried to distort it on purpose yet.
i have to say, scrubbing the audio on the tape is waaaaaaay more fun that it should be!? like, i have never wanted to do that before, and its really silly and pointless… and fun. i keep doing it, my son who is 5 keeps doing it, and the ability to make a loop, and play with the loop is, again, more engaging than i had ever thought. not that i would suggest anyone should get this for the scrubbing feature beyond wanting to have a really great portable speaker. but i was surprised at how nice it is to actually play with.
obviously this is a personal review and everyone is different- i haven’t listened to the radio in… well… my whole life? maybe when i was 13? but damn, having this here, built into the portable speaker with such good sound, i’m having fun scrolling through the stations and will probably keep doing it when i’m in a new place to get the vibe of where i am. i’ve been using disk mode with the ambient patch quite a lot. its not life changing, but its absolutely perfect for me to have on in the background while i’m working. i will most definitely use it all the time when i have the option. so one more point for this speaker where i didn’t really necessarily think i’d care about the ambient option much more than just a fun little curiosity. its kind of cool in that the resulting audio is “new” all the time in that its not an intentional piece of music that i put on which my brain already knows consciously, and yet at the same time the ambience is not so compelling as to distract me from whatever i’m trying to get done. maybe that’s unintentional, but it falls squarely in brian eno’s law that the music must be as forgettable as it is memorable when dealing with ambient.
i have my ortho remote paired with it, and that’s also an experience that i enjoy in practice so much more than i ever thought i would. because in the end, its a portable speaker, so why have a bluetooth puck to control the volume!? but i can leave the speaker in an unobtrusive spot in the room and then have the ortho remote next to me on the kitchen table to adjust the volume to taste, change radio stations, etc. yes it almost feels silly when i write it here, but its such a smooth experience and somehow beyond the basic building blocks of what is happening. plus as others have mentioned in reviews, completely pointless but having the motorized controls on the unit itself follow the ortho commands is sublime.
i don’t have much to say about the mantra or metronome settings… at this point in my life i don’t see myself ever turning them on again after i checked them out once. maybe if i’m at a rehearsal and we need a metronome in an emergency then i can maybe remember in my brain that oh yeah my portable speaker has a built in metronome?
in all the previews and reviews people kept mentioning the lack of no line out… and hearing that i must admit i was kind of confused as to why you needed a line out. but now that i have the speaker in front of me- i want a line out. even just for something stupid like headphones for the radio or ambient mode. but yeah, if you could export the ambient mode from the onboard tape, that would have made a ton of sense. and i’m also sad that for now you can’t ambient mode the line in or bluetooth in audio. but whatever, i find all this extra stuff to just be extra and not why i got this in the first place.
totally happy to have a speaker of this size of this quality. i hope they continue to support the product for years to come, like the op-1 and op-z. if so, i’m sure i’ll value it even more in the future. but for now, i know i’ll really appreciate having it even without any updates.
not wanting to jump into all the ob-4 hate on the price (and especially wanting to avoid all the hate that it wasn’t a synth), but personally i don’t get why everyone is so mad over the price- i mean, i can show you a TON of speakers which cost way way more?? don’t get me wrong, of course i don’t think $600 is cheap, or that amount of doesn’t hold significance to my overall economy. absolutely i would have loved to have paid less. but i bought the speaker to try it out, thought i could return it if i didn’t feel it was worth that amount of money to me. and that debate can still go on, my only point i want to make is that now that i have the unit in hand, the build quality is insanely nice. i kind of get the price point, or at least understand it now that i can actually touch it and see it in front of me.
the minimal controls are totally easy to navigate all the functions with and they feel great to use, top quality. the whole unit itself is really tiny as compared to my first impressions of seeing it online. its as wide as the op-z, the top dimensions of it are basically that of an op-z. i would say that I’m very pleasantly surprised by this small form factor, mostly because it sounds good and now it really is portable, small enough to easily throw in my backpack on a trip.
for sure this product would have gotten a lot more love with a better launch. i live in stockholm and from personal experience of being around town at different events and such, in my estimation TE doesn’t do a lot of stuff as intentionally as everyone thinks. that’s certainly not an excuse for their disastrous PR in recent years, and its really not a great look on them from the outside, but i don’t think they are an evil, greedy, money hungry company out to screw over their fans. they are actually really small in many ways- their whole modular product was just one guy who ended up leaving the company before the project was even finished properly. as an owner of their products i also find their lack of clear communication frustrating, but i’ve also met a bunch of them and i’d say the way they run their company pretty accurately reflects their own personalities. they are nice but introverted and chaotic perhaps. not trying to defend their past recent struggles in how they’ve managed their company, but wanted to give a bit of reality to consider amongst all of the backlash. and yeah, damn, the english language launch video for the ob-4 is hard to take with the sound on. i first saw the clip on my phone on the subway without headphones so i was just reading the subtitles and not getting why everyone was freaking out.
so let this review be an antidote to that video! its a really really cool little speaker. i’m super happy they produced it and i’m glad i bought it!
