You may remember Teenage Engineering as the Swedish ID firm that’s developing the gorgeous OP-1 sythesizer. But while digging through their blog I came across another incredible design, something called the Syricon.
I can only guess what this beast is for; TE are tight-lipped about it except for what little info they divulge in this interview with Shift:
It’s a defense training machine! It’s a quite massive machine, built in water-jet cut aluminum sides, stainless steel top-plates, custom cnc’d plastics & alu details. We wanted it to look very custom and were inspired by pro line-array speaker systems + instrumentation seen in the air/space-biz.
We did everything from design, actual construction & building it, development of vector/3d graphics libraries, game development, circuit-boards etc. Crazy project, it was built in 1 month.
Not sure whether to take “defense training machine” as a joke or not. Either way I want one modified to function as a DAW controller.
Oh and then there’s this. These guys are killing it.
Digging the red trackball and big led matrix under the circular glass. The OP-1 is at the top of my list of things to check out at the next NAMM show. Everything I’ve seen from these guys really looks super.
Since I first saw it, I wanted more photos and an explanation of what that thing is. Anybody?
To me, it looks a $10,000 version of missile defense, especially with that tracking ball. As soon as I saw it and that little keyboard I thought of WarGames or that game James Bond played in Never Say Never Again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gIqdmVsRAc
I’m absolutely baffled as to how these guys get money for R&D! As far as I can tell, they don’t sell much stuff apart from a studio rigging system. So how are they operating? Is that it?!
I received an email some days ago about OP-1’s beta testing. It’s gonna start soon, they are already assembling the units according to their blog and those who are selected will have to buy their units. But we’ll get our names in the final user manual!
I agree on the R&D… since the quote is highlighted here… they did say “defense training machine”… maybe they weren’t joking? It’s possible that they landed a defense contract to generate capital. :\ It does seem odd that they’ve managed to stay in business for years with few-to-none in terms of actual products.
I have the strange feeling that Trent Reznor already has that in his basement hooked up to modular synth.
Jokes aside, this is a beautiful piece of…whatever it is. I’m really excited to find out what it does. I want some video of it in action. Teenage Engineering impresses me with pretty much whatever they make.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNOhB-ettF0&feature=player_profilepage
Thanks so much Daniel! Looks like my instinct was right. :\ Certainly an intense camaign! Sort of terrifying.