Teenage Engineering
Swedish Synth-manufacturer
Teenage Engineering is synth and speaker manufacturer and was founded 2005 by Jesper Kuouthoofd, David Eriksson, Jens Rudberg and David Möllerstedt in Stockholm, Sweden. The Companys vision is to make a product that the consumer could use straight out of the box, without going trough the steep learning curve synths usually have.
In the start, Teenage Engineering´s vision was to create a minimalistic looking synth that was easy to use. After releasing the OP-1 the company received a lot of attention and got the reputation as a company that accomplished to think “outside the box”. However, the price at 849$ made it unviable for a lot of consumers. To conquer this, Teenage Engineering began to produce their low-cost synth series Pocket Operators, also known as PO. To reach out to a broader audience, Teenage Engineering collaborated with the Cheap Monday to sell the synths for the relative cheap price of 59$.
1974 the Swedish speaker-manufacturer Sonab released their OD-11 – a speaker that was supposed to give high-quality sound in a consumer’s living room, where the acoustics is far from perfect. Sonabs idea of creating something easy to use for the ordinary consumer fits right into the vision of Teenage Engineering, who with permission from Sonab created a new version of OD-11, with the same name as the old one.
2010 - OP-1 – Synth / 2014 - OD-11 – Speaker / 2015 - PO-10 (series) – Synths / 2016 - PO-20 (series) – Synths / 2017 - PO-30 (series) - Synths