Review: Teenage Engineering TP-7 Field Recorder

Teenage Engineering—the Swedish company responsible for gorgeous, iconic little gadgets like the OP-1 synthesizer, OD-11 speaker, lamp collabs with IKEA, and a series of versatile Pocket Operators—has a knack for creating tech that makes you mad you don’t have it.

It’s fitting, then, that TE’s TP-7 Field recorder is the most beautiful tape recorder you’ll probably never hold. The thing was released in 2023. It costs $1,499 and is often out of stock because it sells out so quickly. It’s not hard to see why. Teenage Engineering is known for making eye-catching, feature-packed devices that delight the senses and drain the pocketbook. The TP-7 is no different.

But I can imagine you already, screaming the price so loud you think I can hear it. “It’s $1,500?” you bellow. “Why do I need this?”

Well, you don’t. You can find plenty of audio gear that gets you audio quality as good as (or better in the case of the built-in mic) the TP-7 that go for a quarter of the price. If you’re looking for a workhorse for professional-quality audio, you can’t go wrong with something like the Zoom H4 ($169). Need something smaller? The Tula Mics UBS-C mic ($259) sounds great and looks cute, too.

But what you won’t get from those devices is the sheer sense of flair. The TP-7 is the Ferrari of field recorders. It's a sleek, sexy, pricey little beast that’s sure to earn the envious gaze of anyone in the know. It is a gadget for gadget sommeliers—those who savor supple, rounded corners and finished-aluminum chassis. This is a device for the enlightened gearheads who value knobfeel and texture above ho-hum baseline features such as practicality and having enough money to pay rent this month.

If God came down to Earth tomorrow to deliver 10 more commandments, the TP-7 is what I’d use to record them.

You Spin Me Right Round

The hallmark feature of the TP-7 is the spinning disk that occupies much of the front face of the recorder. It rolls round and round and round while you’re recording or playing back—a mesmerizingly smooth throwback to the era of spinning tape recorders. You can rest a finger on the disc to stop the playback or recording, or scratch it like a DJ to manipulate the sound.

The next thing you'll likely notice is the long rectangular rocker bar on the side of the TP-7. This serves as an instant fast forward/rewind button that lets you scrub through recordings quickly. And you’ll be able to hold a bunch of those recordings, because the TP-7 has 128 GB of internal storage and records in 24-bit/96 kHz. There's no SD card slot for expandable storage. That's a bummer when many mainstay recorder brands will let you fill up as many storage cards as you like.

Less visible, but perhaps more important for the actual purpose of the device, are three 3.5-mm audio slots along the top. These can be switched to work as input or output jacks, and can be adjusted to record and playback in mono or stereo. There's a 6.35-mm audio out jack on the bottom, with an adapter to a standard 3.5-mm headphone jack included.

These inputs are the primary modes of recording on the TP-7, though there is also a built-in internal mic used for recording on the fly. A Memo button in the top right corner of the recorder instantly activates a recording mode when held down, even if the device is entirely switched off. That audio doesn’t sound quite as good as audio you’d get directly from a line-in source, but it works well for capturing quick thoughts or sudden sounds. It has trouble when there’s wind, because there isn't space for a pop filter, and it also picks up any and all background noise unless you hold the mic real close to your mouth.

All this is powered by an internal battery that recharges via USB-C and lasts about seven hours.

The TP-7 is part of Teenage Engineering’s Field family of audio gadgets, which are all geared toward portability and usage out in the wild. The Field lineup also includes Teenage Engineering’s CM-15 microphone, TX-6 field mixer, and the legendary synthesizer OP-1 Field. Each device is a beautiful art piece on its own and loaded with functionalities for taping tracks and beeping boops on the go. They’re designed to plug and play into each other, to maximize your possibilities for sleek sound engineering synergy. They all retail in the range of $1,200 to $2,000 apiece, so assembling a complete kit of these bad boys won’t come cheap.

The TP-7 is the teensiest of the Field crew (so far)—roughly the size of a deck of cards and about twice as heavy. It’s smaller than a smartphone or even many wallets, so it slides into a pants pocket with ease. The rocker on the side might catch on your jeans from time to time when you go to slip the recorder in or out, but otherwise the size makes carrying the TP-7 around almost seamless.

The TP-7 comes with a companion app that allows users to connect to the recorder via Bluetooth to sync files and remotely control playback on the device. It also offers free transcription services, which is fantastic when you consider that something like Otter Pro transcription costs $10 per month.

Transcription is nice, but it’s not quite on par with the kind of experience you'd get from a service like Otter or Google's Pixel transcript offerings. TP-Transcripts also don’t distinguish between different speakers, so long recordings will come out in a giant block of text. If you're hell-bent on buying one, you could think of things this way, though: Otter Pro costs $10 a month, but as TP-7 transcription is free, it will only take you 12 and half years for this recorder to pay for itself.

Sadly, the app is for iOS only, which means Android and Windows users will have to do without. It’s not a huge loss, because file transfer is a breeze. You can use the TP-7 app on iOS, or there’s a companion app for desktop Macs. If you’re not on an Apple machine, you can just power the recorder off, connect the USB cable to a computer, and move files between the devices manually.

Reel Life

Here’s the thing about the TP-7: I’ll probably never ever buy one. Companies can send us review units here at WIRED. This is the case for the TP-7 I’ve been using for this review, and one day they will have to pry it out of my hands like they’re taking a ring from Gollum. Once that is done, I’ll be bereft but will make do without one.

The exorbitant cost is, of course, largely a factor but not the only thing. The TP-7 is a joyous device to have and to hold, but it is not always the most practical recorder if you have regular, professional-ish audio needs.

Recorders, generally speaking, are meant to sit in the background, quietly absorbing sound without contributing to it. They’re a neutral, inconspicuous product type almost by necessity. If you’re recording field audio, like trying to capture the perfect loon call out in the wild, you’d be better served by a proper shotgun mic to pinpoint the sound. Audio recorded directly in a studio sounds great on the TP-7, but again, you can handle that with some far less expensive yet still really good microphones.

The device can also be tricky to navigate, with some menu diving required to access certain features that won’t feel intuitive right away. There’s also some kinks you’ll find if you’re coming from another type of recorder.

As one example, I tried to feed music from Spotify through the TP-7 to test the line-in functions, with a pair of headphones plugged into the output jack so I could monitor the sound. At the time, I didn’t realize that by default the audio still played through both the plugged-in headphones and the on-device speakers. That is, until my girlfriend came in from the other room, laptop in hand, to tap me on the shoulder and say, “I’m getting on a call with my boss. Can you please stop blasting that song.”

I was able to solve this little problem, along with a few similar snafus, by sifting through the thick little flip-book that is the instruction manual. But sometimes there wasn't exactly an intuitive way of figuring that out without manual diving. And some interactions take a bit to get the hang of.

Leaving the recorder running, for instance, takes two button presses—one tap of the red Record button, then a separate press of the Play button right next to it. On similar devices from other brands, you usually just tap the Record button once and it starts taping. These little idiosyncrasies are the price you pay for something like this. (Besides, you know, the actual price you pay for it.)

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun

Viewing the TP-7 from some kind of hoity-toity professional standpoint is perhaps a little disingenuous. Because the TP-7 is just a good time. It’s far more fun than you’d expect a recorder to be. After all, you’ll recall that the whole front disc spins while you’re recording, and the thing just feels great in your hand, with all its clicky-clacky buttons and smooth switches.

There’s also clever, well-thought-out functions that make recording more interesting. If you press the Play button a second time while playback is going, the disk will reverse its spin and play the audio backward. It’s a fun little option that could be great for music producers fiddling a sample or anyone checking their recordings for any secret satanic messages.

Also the ability to mix and match inputs and outputs with the plugs at the top offers a great deal of flexibility for combining with other audio gizmos. I paired the TP-7 with another of Teenage Engineering’s creations: the EP-133 K.O.2, a remarkably affordable (for Teenage Engineering) sampling device. By mixing and matching the input and output cables between the devices, I could record from the sampler into the TP-7, then manipulate the sound there and port it back over to the sampler, with the DJ scratch sounds fully intact.

You could do this with any other recording device or turntable accessory, but it’s not going to feel as damn good as it does with the TP-7 and company. And Teenage Engineering seems to know that, too. In the TP-7 manual, the company even suggests connecting two TP-7s to a TX-6 mixer to use as a portable DJ set for live performances. Ah well cool, good idea, that will just be $4,197 please.

This is the terrible thing about Teenage Engineering. The company’s stuff makes me want to collect every last thing it has ever made and hoard it all in a pile beneath me like a dragon Smaug who thinks he knows how to DJ.

So yeah, do you really need the TP-7? Of course not. Will you ever want to let it go once you’ve held it? Also probably not.