I would talk about my OP-XY more, but it annoys me to be accused of being a fanboy so I’ll just mention that I’m still enjoying mine. People take these things way too seriously imo. These are all just toys regardless if it’s a $4000 analog poylsynth or $3000 worth of Elektron gear.
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Sequential has been charging boatloads for ages because they make quality stuff. Same with Nord but not nearly as many complaints for either of those brands compared to TE.
I don’t understand why people spend so much time complaining about something they’re not going to buy anyway.
I love my OB-6 and my OP XY, totally worth the money for me.
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Totally understand this point. But in all reality I could give two shits (ie, not just one) if doo doo heads on the internet wrongly think I’m a TE fanboy. I have many more sincere challenges in real life. “Choose your battles wisely” is not a thing that exists on the internet.
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True. Apparently, TE spent two years developing the XY, and that was from the Z base they already had. Any other manufacturer wanting to mimic the XY will have a long development time ahead unless they already have some basic underlying features that can be adapted to include similar features (hello, Elektron).
TE is a weird anomaly. They can sell you cheapo PO and the blood-draining XY from the same shop. We can’t exactly call them an elitist musical device brand, but I can understand that when it’s a device that many want but is out of reach to many, it can drive this type of discordant comment.
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I guess those expensive synths look like ‘serious’ instruments for ‘serious’ musicians. Where as TE groove boxes have fun graphics and fun features etc, so look like they’re aimed at a certain market, but the price doesn’t correlate. Maybe that’s why some people feel it’s aimed at them but out of reach cost wise.
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The thing is 90% on this forum are not serious musicians
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That doesn’t mean they don’t take themselves too seriously.
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Yeah that’s what I wanted to say. People like to talk, discuss, complain etc, but maybe should focus more on upgrading their skills 
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I agree. On a similar note, I see the word “toy” get thrown around a lot as a derogatory term for certain instruments, especially for TE stuff. But I think it’s one of the greatest compliments you can give to the designers of an instrument. If an instrument turns out as engaging, fun, and easy to use as a toy, the designers did something very right, imo.
The other perspective is usually that an instrument is a “tool”, a “workhorse”, or “serious”. And of course there are a lot of aspects in music production that can be classified as “work”. TE are for the most part really good as making these aspects as fun and smooth as possible, in some cases to the point that almost anyone can come up with something interesting quickly. And I think that mostly holds true for their whole line-up from the POs to the OPs. Maybe that is one aspect that might be a bit threatening to people as they feel their hobby is being kidnapped by untalented hipsters that don’t want to put in the “serious work” to produce music?
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Lol you are totally over estimating Behringers captabilities. True - give them a saw tooth and theyll knock out something in a bland plastic box. But its disingenerous to TE to think Behringer could come anywhere close. They dont have the resources for one - they employed 2 people to fiddle about with the OB-6 clone for years in their spare time ffs. At best they could probably copy the SeqTrak
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I think people easily accept premium cost if there’s obvious manufacturing involved and maybe that’s even done in a country were workers earn decent wages. It’s easier to look at a hefty Sequential or Moog synth and accept that it comes at a price (although Behringer has changed that in recent years and Moog also seems to produce cheaper now but keeps prices high).
With things like TE instruments, it’s harder to understand why they’re so expensive. They’re probably just charging what they think they can get away with, but there’s probably also more hidden costs for people being creative that are harder to grasp. I rarely see people complaining about the archaic ways of preset management, DAW integration or UX design on Sequential synths, while these same people are enraged that Elektron doesn’t have their incredible and free Overbridge ready at launch.
Looking at XY, it’s obvious that a lot of people spent a lot of time coming up with new ways of creative sequencer based composition and performance, and making that understandable and fun looking. I don’t feel like Sequential spent a lot of time and money on improving their preset management or effects quality. Or coming up with new visionary instruments with new ways of making music.
That has to come at a price, but it’s hard to tell how expensive that is compared to say manufacturing a new Sequential synth. And discern how much money is going into the pockets of management that could be passed on to customers. Which leaves us at: it’s probably not worth spending so much time on price discussions where we’re all just talking out of our asses. Just look at what the product does and decide if that’s worth it to you or not. Like: I don’t like Apple as a company or brand and there’s lots of things about my MacBook Air or Iphone I can and will complain about. They could also pass on some of the premium they’re asking to the people making their products. But at the end of the day, their devices work best for me and are reliably good, so I stick with them until there’s an equal alternative.
My humble guess is that neither TE nor Sequential management are making big money by ripping off customers, so it’s probably okay to give them your money. Maybe there’s more discussion about TE because there’s no real clone or alternative for their products yet, like there is with Behringer analog synths nowadays. So less choice, more discussion. But like it has been mentioned, if it was so easy and cheap to just clone OP1 or XY and make a lot of money with cheap but equal alternatives, we’d probably already have these.
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I also would like to see timestretching, in any form, so I can transpose samples around without the varispeed effect, without having to do a multisample
Question - so I have my 303 sequenced by the OP-XY, it’s all in time and playing nicely, routed back into the OP, sounds great - I want to then record this into a sample, IDC if it’s synth drum or multi - I can do this, but is it possible to record a synced loop? It seems the interface is ‘press a key to sample’. Obv this is manual so you can only get so close to a perfect loop. I guess you could chop it down manually or record 2 goes and let the sample get cut off when sequencing. Maybe use the threshhold to get it to start in time? any other ideas or method?
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Shift+M1 on the sampling screen to start recording once the threshold is passed. At the moment, there is no way to get a perfect loop, other than manually setting the end point. I’d also love to have that functionality on the OP-XY. DTII makes it really smooth and easy.
Edit: Okay, I’ve just played around with the tape buffer and found a wonky workaround for recording/resampling a perfect 16 step loop.
- Program a 16 track sequence on either the internal audio tracks or the external track and make sure this is sent to the tape track (shift and dark grey encoder on the M3 page)
- Go to the tape track and turn the light grey encoder to 16, everything else should be default
- Press play and see how the tape buffer fills up with audio
- Press stop
- Now you’ve got the 16 step loop on the lowest F key in the buffer
- Put down a trig on the first step of the tape track that plays that lowest F key and make its length 16 steps
- Mute every other track aside from the tape track and make sure to not hit the play button or the tape buffer will be overwritten with silence
- Go to a drum, sampler or multisample track and hit the sampling button, set the source to output ( ->o symbol)
- Choose the key you want to sample to
- Shift + M1 to engage threshold sampling
- Press play, the tape buffer will play exactly once, press M1 again to stop sampling
- OP-XY will truncate the silence at the end of the sample (pretty neat, I only learned it does that just now)
- Set the sample to loop with the white encoder and enjoy
lol, it’s so sketchy but it does work. At least for 16 steps and there has to be something on the first step for the threshold to work. I guess you can sample longer sequences if you half the project tempo and mess with the track scalings. But yeah, the method is less than ideal and really easy to mess up if you press play at the wrong time or forget to mute something.
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TYVM for the info. That would probably be my top feature but IDK if others use external sampling as much…
How does the DT2 do it? Do you set up trigs or something of the sort
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Yes, on the DTII its one knob on the sampling screen where you can dial in the recording length for the sampling in sequencer steps that is linked to the current bpm. Recording can be synced to the moment you press play. Very straight forward and easy. I hope TE does something like that with the OP-XY.
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shame that they’ve sent the guy a broken unit. it’s also weird that it came out with 1.09 firmware. it should be 1.03
as we say in German:
Ein Satz mit X…
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You can just use the hold function for tape track instead of worrying about programming the sequencer and muting other tracks.
I’ve also been curious about how much audio you can record into the tape track (16 step limit) if you-
Extend the tape track out to 4 bars?
Slow down master bpm to something absurdly slow, 50bpm?
Haven’t tried yet.
Ey mate! First impressions???
Edit: just seen that TE send you a defective device 
🫣:man_facepalming:t2: