Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II

[nittygritty]

This is a YouTube video that was made from another YouTube videos comment section. Grasping away at straws right now.

I just find this funny.

[nittygritty]

I haven’t experienced it yet but I’m nervous. The broken fader is one thing to deal with.

But I don’t understand why everyone is glossing over the units with the CPU issues. The hard resets. Wiping everything from memory. Those need to be addressed and looked at by TE. Is it a batch of bad cpus like the faders ?
The guy in the video above doing the speculation who fixed his fader, he has the hard reset happening. So he desoldered and re soldered the fader to possibly have a cpu issues that are no longer covered under warranty.

Hopefully TE address these things. Being part of the first run with a working unit, there’s this feeling I’m I part of a 30 day recall to inevitably happen …?

[Omen802]

Well speak of the Devil!
I think were all collectively thinking the same thing here. Hope it comes sooner rather than later.

[oktatracker]

@shigginpit

other than the time “the man” showed up on a personal note to discuss how he worked on the monomachine etc

What man? Link please.

[Omen802]

TE…can we PLEEASE get a latch FX feature…my fingers are doing gymnastics over here trying to make magic happen. it doesn’t need to be this hard.
FX Latch: Shift+ double tap FX btn ?

[shigginpit]

It was on the elektron-users forum before the transition to elektronauts was complete, here’s the text of it as dictated by the lovely, the talented @PeterHanes, along with a link to the original elektron-users post. It’s long so I’m going to hide the text and whoever wants to read that can clicky the arrow.

Summary

@PeterHanes

Here is the text of Jesper Kouthoofd’s only post on the elektron-users.com forum, from September 2010:

Hi all,

This is Jesper from Teenage Engineering.

Sometimes I check this forum to see what you Elektron users are up to.
It is always interesting, especially for me who have been working on some of the Elektron machines as a designer. I love that you comment on all kinds of stuff, have feature requests, get mad about details etc.

I never write comments on forums, so this is the one and only exception.
I do it because I want you Elektron users to get the background story of the OP-1. And to clear things out a little bit in this thread.

Around 1999/2000 I was doing the final work on the MonoMachine and had daily discussions with Daniel Hansson about what machine to do next. I told Daniel about my dream of a machine I have sketched on, based on the Roland SH-101 but in a pocket format. Daniel loved the idea, but was concerned about the battery power and the overall performance of a machine in that size. Remember that this was 10 years ago, and the technology wasn’t quite there yet. So he told me to continue to sketch up a concept, but keep it more or less outside Elektron.

Anyway, I started to work on the machine as a side project. (Daniel and the Elektron team had another vision about a more live / dj sampling machine (UW that later bacame the Octatrack I guess) I did a lot of sketches of the functionality and renderings. And finally Daniel called me one day and said Elektron had a collaboration with Evolution to make a portable machine / controller. As you might guessed, when we presented the stuff, they thought we were insane and rejected all of it. It was too expensive. Impossible to manufacture, no clear target group etc. That could have been the end of story, but it wasn’t.

As some of you know a tragic incident happend a few years later. In 2007 Daniel died in a car accident. He was one of my best friends and it was a great loss. He had called me just a couple of weeks before and wanted to show me a sketch of a new machine he had been working on for some time. (I don’t know what he had in mind, but I guess the Octatrack is in a close direction, even if I know there’s at least one other great talent behind that machine.)

At that time me and some friends had just started Teenage Engineering. I was still doing some work for Elektron, but when Daniel passed away, it wasn’t just the same for me and I guess Elektron also wanted move on and build a strong team in Gotheburg, which I think was right. So the opportunity the make a portable machine was more or less gone.

All this came to a conclusion. If we don’t make this machine ourselfs, no one else will. So we have put all our effort, time and money to make this machine real.
In many ways as a tribute to Elektron, but also to make a a 10 year old dream to make an extraordinary instrument come true.

With that said, I just want you to know how emotional a project like this is. It’s not about business or being smart or about money. It’s your life. We do this because we love it.
We have dreamed about this machine and it’s functions for so many years. We have all put a large piece of ourselfs into this. This of course makes us sensitve for speculations etc.
I guess the above applies for the Elektron team as well.

So… let us clear things out.

No, it’s not a clever marketing strategy lending out an OP-1 pre-production unit to a House Mafia band. They just wanted to use it as a prop in their vid. And it ended up as the center piece of the video. We had nothing to say about it. And of course the track wasn’t made on the OP-1. It isn’t out yet. And yes, you can create a song like that (why do someone who has never touched an OP-1 write things like "that’s not possible to do on an OP-1?). Come on… it’s not that hard. And remember that the OP-1 is also a controller, so it’s nothing wrong to visually connect the OP-1 with a song made in Logic.

Keep up the good work Elektron.

-Jesper

Ps. We have some really great stuff going on. Ds.

[Guinness2u]

Just received mine. Fader and speaker works. It did have imprints of the fader and rotary pots on the internal white cover but not noticeable on the outer cover. Not putting the fader knob on yet. I bought faders ahead of time just in case. Hopefully will not have to use one.
Thanks Control Voltage for good packing.

[djcuvcuv]

im curious if you dont mind my asking to tell us more about exactly in what way each of the faders were broken?

[mssrcolby]

The GC one was crooked and difficult to move, sometimes it would make contact and the values would change if you pushed it hard. If you slid it normally it would scrape along and not change anything. The TE one moves smoothly and feels normal but seems to make no contact at all. I can’t get the values to change even with more pressure.

[djcuvcuv]

damn that stinks. are you sure the TE one isn’t changing the values? it can be tough to tell sometimes in the mix if its only changing the effect of one group etc. just pointing this out justtt in case. personally i had a moment when i thought my fader didnt work but then i realized i was affecting reverb on one group which had only one snare on it.

[elxsound]

Well that was misleading!

Didn’t realize it was just a comment, not a demonstration.

[djcuvcuv]

i know there has been talk about speakers not working, and mine certainly works but i recall some folks saying theirs was too quiet? how can one tell if theirs is “too quiet?” mine is def not loud, and i can’t tell if its simply normal or not. i guess the reason im even inquiring about it is it struck me as not quiet as loud as i was expecting. i dont think its quiet as loud (or as nice) as the OP1F speaker, if that gives any reference.

[Lailai]

Got my return label within 2 days, but to my knowledge TE doesn’t offer replacement… just refund

[deepseacommittee]

Does anybody record this directly into their iPhone, into an app like GarageBand? I’m looking into options, and see iRig is a popular interface? Anybody have experience with that? Would that be the easiest/cheapest way?

[CEKBEHTC]

mine was incredibly loud, my main volume knob was at 5-10% maybe

Edit: talking about output volume with headphones, misread the question

[PearTreeCraft]

Fader movement is always shown on the left side of the display regardless of what it is controlling.

[elxsound]

Might see if there’s a free decibel meter app for your phone.

List the model/brand of your phone and provide the distance from you phone and the KOii, including any orientation notes so someone else can replicate and provide a comparison

Otherwise, buy a 2nd one, or convince a friend that they need one too and compare that.

Might even be able to leave out the app and just provide distance/orientation placement and record audio to compare.

[mssrcolby]

Yeah, unfortunately, I’m certain

[KingMidas]

Not worrying about my fader or knobs anymore while on the go. It’ll look better when the rest of my legos arrive. They sent the smooth plates and a few other flats in a separate package from Denmark for some reason. I may leave it like this with the screen showing.

[schoolbabyboy]

super compressed beat tonight. i went to the ballet and saw the nutcracker the other night and i realized ive been using more wind/orchestral instruments in my tunes since then. gotta get out there and absorb the arts more often