Jesper Kouthoofd was one of the four founders of the Stockholm collective ACNE in 1996 before he started Teenage Engineering in 2005. “The products aren’t the business,” he said. The company opened its first store, 6,000 square feet at 216 Lafayette Street in SoHo that it designed and built itself, and let opening-night guests assemble EP-133 K.O. II samplers on a production line installed for the night. Two weeks after that, the EP-35 launched there.
It is a 35-watt amplifier on a rechargeable battery for anything that plugs in: guitar, microphone, keyboard, a line input, USB and Bluetooth, up to six sources mixed at once. Eight effects on each of the mic and guitar inputs are chosen with roller dials and named Indie, Twang, Robo Choir and Frog. There is a looper. The back opens into a storage bay for cables with a camp light that switches to a sound-reactive disco mode. It weighs seven pounds and carries like a lunchbox. A dock kit clips a K.O. II or two Pocket Operators to its side, and a plug-in antenna turns it into an FM radio. The amp is $349. The bag, the K.O. pedal and the accessory bundle are extra.
The battery powered amp is an idea from 1972. The Pignose 7-100 put five watts in a box on six AA batteries, with a volume knob shaped like a pig’s snout, and its makers handed prototypes to Led Zeppelin and the Who. Pignose still sells it. What Teenage Engineering adds is the grid: everything it makes clips to everything else it makes, so the amp becomes the base of a stack.
