Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II Sampler

[Dyst]

Worth mentioning that I ordered this early from TE's site and got a shipping confirmation today. Looks like it's gonna be here tomorrow. Stoked!

How early? Still no confirmation here for an afternoon order unfortunately

I ordered at 11:25 AM EST.

[polesay]

1.) Anyone scope out any potential alternative cases? TE’s soft case looks nice but for the price, I’d prefer something a little more rigid/protective.

2.) sampling from an iPhone with the lighting to 3.5mm dongle and a TRS cable should work fine, right?

[fruitsnake]

Anyone else get a defective fader? Straight out of the box my fader is broken. The value is stuck at 50%. Interestingly, when I wiggle the fader around it engages the autosave feature, which leads me to believe that its motion is being registered on some level, but the value remain at 50% no matter what. I sent B&H customer service an email, so we'll see how this goes. I don't seem to be the first person to be having this problem.

I saw one guy on youtube who posited that putting on the fader cap could be damaging the fader, but I didn't feel like it took an unusual amount of force to put the cap on. I'm tempted to just pop the back off and see about replacing the slider myself, but I'll wait til B&H gives me a timeframe for repair/exchange.

#fadergate

The real bummer is that the thing kicks ass, so I really just wish this fader wasn't broken.

[FletchNYC]

Anyone else get a defective fader? Straight out of the box my fader is broken. The value is stuck at 50%. Interestingly, when I wiggle the fader around it engages the autosave feature, which leads me to believe that its motion is being registered on some level, but the value remain at 50% no matter what. I sent B&H customer service an email, so we'll see how this goes. I don't seem to be the first person to be having this problem.

I saw one guy on youtube who posited that putting on the fader cap could be damaging the fader, but I didn't feel like it took an unusual amount of force to put the cap on. I'm tempted to just pop the back off and see about replacing the slider myself, but I'll wait til B&H gives me a timeframe for repair/exchange.

#fadergate

The real bummer is that the thing kicks ass, so I really just wish this fader wasn't broken.

Someone else said their buttons were getting stuck. Seems the build quality is inconsistent on these units.

[Aleksey]

Worth mentioning that I ordered this early from TE's site and got a shipping confirmation today. Looks like it's gonna be here tomorrow. Stoked!

How early? Still no confirmation here for an afternoon order unfortunately

I ordered at 11:25 AM EST.

Thank you! Seems like I’ll get it next week.

[Drmdmamd]

Alto music seems to have stock atm

[chorus7]

Mine arrived yesterday but unfortunately with the fader problem right out of the box ... It stays at 50% and does nothing... What a waste of time and money

[1n]

Is the fader inoperable before fitting the slider cap?

Waiting to find out if my pre-order, promised in a second batch due early December, has a wonky fader.

I'd return it for a full refund with no hard feelings. Hope retailers aren't going to pay for poor design by TE.

I same-day returned an OP-Z that was so curved it wouldn't lie flat on a table. My OP-1 is a solid workhorse, as were the PO's I had a few years ago.

[Back Down the Path]

The EP-133 Fadergate ‘23 is a bit like the Opsix Firesale Screengate of ‘22.

Hoping that mine arrives with a working fader!

Maybe the reason this is so inexpensive by TE standards is that the fader failure issue became known long after they had produced thousands of units and decided to just price it to move!

Like, $299 is suspiciously low. Most people would have still bought this for $499.

[chorus7]

Is the fader inoperable before fitting the slider cap?

Waiting to find out if my pre-order, promised in a second batch due early December, has a wonky fader.

I'd return it for a full refund with no hard feelings. Hope retailers aren't going to pay for poor design by TE.

I same-day returned an OP-Z that was so curved it wouldn't lie flat on a table. My OP-1 is a solid workhorse, as were the PO's I had a few years ago.

Yeah it didn't work from the get go... I think it is the packaging cause you can see where the knobs and slider where rubbing on the box

[polesay]

That’s a bummer. Hope you can get it sorted out, either from TE or where you got it from. I should be getting mine tomorrow so we’ll see what happens.

[1n]

>Yeah it didn't work from the get go... I think it is the packaging cause you can see where the knobs and slider where rubbing on the box.

Gah! Disappointing and frustrating. Hope it's sorted in your favour.

All design questions answered, except the one they never asked.

[hawkfuzz]

Maybe the reason this is so inexpensive by TE standards is that the fader failure issue became known long after they had produced thousands of units and decided to just price it to move!

Like, $299 is suspiciously low. Most people would have still bought this for $499.

This is probably it. They sent out broken units intentionally knowing they’ll have to warranty each one and lose money. It makes sense. Fix a couple and send them to the usual influencers for review so they’ll be complicit in the con.

There’s no way that the faulty slider and cheap price have any correlation.

Evil TE doing it up again.

[sidebottom]

What a waste of time and money

This should be the TE motto at this point. Sorry your shit is wacked. :(

[Back Down the Path]

This is probably it. They sent out broken units intentionally knowing they’ll have to warranty each one and lose money. It makes sense. Fix a couple and send them to the usual influencers for review so they’ll be complicit in the con.

There’s no way that the faulty slider and cheap price have any correlation.

Evil TE doing it up again.

Wow, that escalated quickly! Just a thought by me, wasn’t meant to be controversial.

A slider isn’t some high cost component. Plenty of euro modules, manufactured by companies with 1/100th the capacity for testing, that cost $300 or less, have them and there are not any YouTube videos about DOA sliders days after release. Seems like a really big miss for a larger company. Maybe it’s just that, but I suspect they knew something about the failure rate of the sliders being unacceptably high.

[hawkfuzz]

No a slider isn't high cost but most of the parts aren't but it adds up as you are creating a BOM.

Why do you remain suspicious that they knew about the slider?

There are so many possibilities of why several units are messed up. This is a product launch and series launch so it's highly doubtful they didn't test the form factor for vulnerabilities. They're going to have to replace faulty units.

This sometimes happens just from oversights and the universe being chaos.

[fruitsnake]

Well, I've been sequencing my modular with it via my Shuttle Control, and I must say its pretty much my ideal melodic sequencer. Being able to live loop sections of the midi sequence and scroll around the pattern is amazing, and the punch in fx are sooooo fun when you run the audio from the euro mixer through the KO-II so everything get glitched out together. Sequencing percussion is fun as well, but I think I'll stick with my Tracker for that task, since its step fx are sequencable whereas KO-II's are strictly punch in. I think they'll pair really well together, Tracker for drums and KO-II for synths and melodic samples.

Still waiting for Monday when I see what B&H has to say about the fader situation. Anyone open it up yet and see what the part is? I really just want to fix it myself so I don't have to send back my KO-II.

[Back Down the Path]

Well, I've been sequencing my modular with it via my Shuttle Control, and I must say its pretty much my ideal melodic sequencer. Being able to live loop sections of the midi sequence and scroll around the pattern is amazing, and the punch in fx are sooooo fun when you run the audio from the euro mixer through the KO-II so everything get glitched out together. Sequencing percussion is fun as well, but I think I'll stick with my Tracker for that task, since its step fx are sequencable whereas KO-II's are strictly punch in. I think they'll pair really well together, Tracker for drums and KO-II for synths and melodic samples.

Still waiting for Monday when I see what B&H has to say about the fader situation. Anyone open it up yet and see what the part is? I really just want to fix it myself so I don't have to send back my KO-II.

If you'd rather void your warranty instead of sending it back, here is someone who successfully fixed their fader:

[starthief]

Drove back several hours from a Thanksgiving trip today to find mine waiting on the front porch. I do think the packaging isn't doing the fader any favors -- I can see where it was pressing against the interior white cardboard thing -- but mine works fine.

I've only spent a few minutes with it but live tweaking stuff is super fun. You're gonna want a working fader to tweak stuff and record those tweaks. Also Tune is quantized to semitones and is effectively S&Hd at the start of each note, so you can use it to live transpose chords/drones.

[Happyanimal]

Well, I've been sequencing my modular with it via my Shuttle Control, and I must say its pretty much my ideal melodic sequencer. Being able to live loop sections of the midi sequence and scroll around the pattern is amazing, and the punch in fx are sooooo fun when you run the audio from the euro mixer through the KO-II so everything get glitched out together. Sequencing percussion is fun as well, but I think I'll stick with my Tracker for that task, since its step fx are sequencable whereas KO-II's are strictly punch in. I think they'll pair really well together, Tracker for drums and KO-II for synths and melodic samples.

Still waiting for Monday when I see what B&H has to say about the fader situation. Anyone open it up yet and see what the part is? I really just want to fix it myself so I don't have to send back my KO-II.

Is it possible to input/pass audio thru the effects (without sampling) ?

[Dragonaut]

Sad to report mine also shipped with a broken fader.

[1n]

A user reports on Zuckerbook that Lego bits fit the fader slider.

I don't have Lego. If mine arrives non-functional it's going back for a refund not a replacement.

I want to support good product design / manufacture...

[flts]

FWIW based on reports so far, it sounds like one possible explanation for the large number of DOA sliders may be that at least based on reports the original packaging isn't terribly well designed, and apparently it looks like it's easy for the slider to get stressed / crushed for a longer time in transport and storage, especially if that transport is long enough. Combined with perhaps not the best quality slider part that doesn't withstand forces like that (?).

If so, that's a huge oversight and means quite a few units will be returned for refund or a replacement (let's see what happens with mine) because they didn't bother to have proper styrofoam protection (as far as I understand from comments so far), but probably not something they would've figured out like "hey this part gets broken in normal use or is already dead from the factory, but what the hell, let's ship it anyway".

(Full disclosure: this may be completely off base, haven't received mine yet, haven't seen the packaging, etc. but several people seem to have said it doesn't look like it has enough and the fader might get more stress than intended, which together with the large amount of DOA units makes me think it might be packaging + shipping issue.)

[Chopper]

I can confirm that fadergate is real :(
I really wanted to love this thing, since I am not really a sampler person for the past 15 years, and I need a quick scketchpad portable device, but this didn't start well.
i hope they fix this issue pronto (sent mine back), and looking forwards to a microtonic-powered version...

[abluesky]

Still waiting for mine. Also looking forward to 𝜇 tonic EP.