1 TEENAGE ENGINEERING EP-133 KO II
£299, teenage.engineering
Teenage Engineering may have made its name cooking up costly music gadgets like the OP-1 – and later cemented its reputation in the design world with (amongst other things) its collaborations with Nothing, Ikea and Panic’s Playdate console – but the Swedish company’s retro-styled Pocket Operator series might be its most iconic output.
Sporting a raw buttons-on-circuit-board design, Game-and-Watch-style LCD displays, and differing musical abilities depending on which of the many models you picked, the super-low price of the Pocket Operator series put portable electronic tunesmithing into the hands of the masses. We mention this by way of getting to two of the highlights of the PO line, the boxing-themed PO-33 and Street Fighter co-branded PO-133 – both dinky and remarkably capable samplers, whose DNA is fully present in this truly remarkable evolution of TE’s low-cost line.
What once was LCD is now what TE calls the ‘world’s first super segment hybrid display’, reminiscent of colour-screen LCD games of yore. What once were simple surface-mounted tac-switches are now pressure- and velocity-sensitive mechanical
