Swedish technology and design company Teenage Engineering is known for a lot of things — helping create the look and feel of devices like the Playdate and Nothing Phone, creating expensive voice recorders that every reporter you know wants, and building knobs and buttons better than anyone else — but above all it’s a company music. Now it is launching its latest music device: the EP-133 KO II synthesizer. (The name’s not quite pronounced, so we’ll call it KO II.)
The KO II looks like a high-end version of the Pocket Operator, a very cool, customizable $59 synthesizer launched in 2015 from Teenage Engineering. The Pocket Operator line has been a huge success for Teenage Engineering, and the company now sells a wide range of simple music makers that let you create and mix music from anywhere. At $299, the KO II isn’t exactly an impulse buy, but David Erickson, Teenage Engineering co-founder and president of hardware, says he hopes it can still attract people who want to use it just for fun. You are supposed to live somewhere between pocket operators and OP-1the company’s popular $1,400 synthesizer.
However, this explanation assumes the existence of some kind of road map, which Erikson says is not the case at all. KO II was created purely out of necessity. “It was like an insurance project when the chip crisis happened,” he says. Supply chains have been severely constrained during the pandemic, and even in the summer of 2022, the Teenage Engineering team was unable to obtain some of the parts they needed to make the company’s other synths. So, as an experiment and a hedge against further shortages, the team reversed their design process and placed a year-long order for any parts they could find before actually deciding how those parts would fit together. The team also worked on setting up a new production line in Barcelona, so they could control the whole process themselves.
Erickson says the only real plan at first was to create a larger pocket player that would cost less than $300. What they ended up with is pretty much that. The device itself is a nice palette of buttons, knobs, and connectors with a small rectangular screen on top. Its keys are clicky “like an accountant-style calculator,” Erickson says, and they’re force-sensitive so you can change what you’re playing by pressing harder or gently.
The KO II has 64MB of memory, which is both little and a lot: obviously not the equivalent of computer storage, but enough to store a few songs and some work in progress. “It’s a good constraint,” Erickson says. “We believe in this kind of thing that you should make music and finish your songs. If you’re providing too much storage space… you kind of give the user the option to finish later.”
To help you create those songs, the KO II has 999 different sample holes, an internal microphone for recording your own sound, plus Teenage Engineering’s typically extensive set of tools to play with. (About half of the device’s storage will come full of pre-recorded samples, drum tracks, and other sounds that Ericsson and his team spent months creating and assembling.) You can plug it in with a USB-C cable or use four AAA batteries on the go. The KO II can connect to MIDI devices, plug into your computer, or work with almost anything with a 3.5mm jack.
From a music industry perspective, the KO II is much more capable than a pocket player. Erickson says he hopes you can use the KO II to make entire songs, and that Teenage Engineering made some of the buttons and knobs orange so you can find them more easily while live DJing on a dark stage.
At the same time, he also believes that this may be an easier device for new users even than the Pocket Operator. “We tried to write a guide for the user who had never touched synths,” he says. “We talk about ‘sampling when you record a track,’ rather than assuming you know what it is.” From the company known for making ultra-luxury products that are affordable for only a few and only the professionals understand, the KO II is a shift toward the mainstream. Sick beats and better buttons of all.