Teenage Engineering adds a recorder to their growing range of field gadgets

Teenage Engineering adds a recorder to their growing range of field gadgets

In case you didn’t guess this was coming when they unveiled a field mic, Teenage Engineering has now added a portable field recorder to their Field System. And it’s yours if you’ve got €1499 burning a hole in your pocket.

At least these premium prices are freeing up the Teenagers to create genuinely innovative designs. They do that on a small, niche scale, which is something – compare the new Google foldable phone in the same price bracket. This seems less likely to become quickly outdated in the way a smartphone now does. So in contrast to those equally pricey mass-market devices, at least here’s something refreshingly new.

Notably, what they’ve done in this design is to bring back physical controls. You can jog a motorized ball-bearing “tape reel.” It spins while the device is playing, just as an old reel-to-reel would, and doubles as an input device for scrubbing, pausing, and navigation. It’s essentially the iPod wheel back and more tactile. There’s also a mechanical rocker for additional scrub control, plus tape-style push buttons for transport, volume, and so on, and an LED display.

A lot of the functionality here is via app – which also offers push-button transcription. (It’s odd, given how good machine learning-powered transcription is now, that mainstream vendors haven’t offered that.)

Other than that, this is a fairly conventional – if high-end – device. There’s an internal mic plus jacks for connecting inputs, which you could use to connect to the rest of their Field System:

  • 3x stereo two-way jack input/output/headset connectors
  • 1x stereo headphone connector with 3.5 to 6.35 mm jack adapter
  • built-in microphone and speaker
  • 128GB internal storage
  • 24-bit/96 kHz usb audio interface
  • bluetooth low energy
  • rechargeable battery
  • 7 hrs battery life
  • 64×32 pixel monochrome display

The ad copy begins with this oddly pretentious idea: “there are thoughts, ideas and fragments that – for the sake of humanity -we need to record and be able to return to as a reference, as a seed for new thoughts or just to remember another time.”

Uh, yeah, I guess that’s what recorders do. Then again, they could do worse – RCA kicked off the technology by suggesting you could remind a dog of his dead owner.

I’m still guessing this will appeal at least to music folks looking at the range – in contrast to the more multi-function TX-6 or even the potential of the new field mic, it’s just hard to imagine spending this much on a recorder . (That is not in any way to condone the UI/UX of the inexpensive recorders, which is, in a word, trash.) If you’re just transcribing an interview, instead of using this and a smartphone, you could… just use the smartphone, obviously.

But come on – you do want to play with one for at least a few minutes, right? that design…

Maybe we all need some great Swedish day jobs and then we can play with the Field System on our evenings and weekends, which I think in Sweden is quite generous, no?

Just be careful: while working out that you don’t need this, you can go down a rabbit hole and wind up buying a vintage Nagra or something.

https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7

Previously:

In case you didn’t guess this was coming when they unveiled a field mic, Teenage Engineering has now added a portable field recorder to their Field System. And it’s yours if you’ve got €1499 burning a hole in your pocket. At least these premium prices are freeing up the Teenagers to create genuinely innovative designs.…