Whether Teenage Engineering’s TX-6 mini mixer is worth its $1,200 asking price is open to debate, but TE has just thrown a bit more potential value into the device with the addition of live beat tracking for any incoming audio.
This means that the TX-6 can now act as a sync box. Having ‘listened’ to the incoming audio, it can generate a click track based on it, and send sync out over MIDI and Bluetooth. And this all happens in real-time.
Svante, one of the Teenage Engineering devs, says of this latest innovation: “Live, realtime beat-tracking is challenging, because the algorithm has to anticipate the beats before they happen. On the one hand, it should react to tempo changes swiftly. On the other hand, it shouldn't get thrown off by spurious variations in timing (what non-scientists call ‘groove’).
“We have spent a lot of effort on finding the right balance between these two opposites: reactivity and stability.”
The live input tracking is part of the v1.2.5 TX-6 firmware update, which also adds improved tap tempo and BPM adjustment. TX-6 owners can grab it from the downloads page of the Teenage Engineering website.
