Comment by sleepybrett 5 days ago
The pocket operators have kind of 'grown up' and now they are doing a larger format thingie that is kinda like a pocket operator: https://teenage.engineering/products/ep
I especially like the bardcore one: https://teenage.engineering/products/ep-1320
They're great, but I feel their pricing moves them out of impulse purchase (or "drunk eBay") territory. And for me, they're kinda in that no mans land of "I want something better that my OPs, do I spend a few hundred bucks on one of those, a few grand on an OP-1, or do I start looking at Behringer clones or 2nd hand pro music studio gear?"
The newest one, EP-40, just came out! It's got the best specs by far and the features are a superset of the original EP-133, so it would be my strong recommendation. Unfortunately EP-1320 never received any updates so it lags behind, but hopefully they remedy that. Just don't buy hardware with hopes of unpromised future updates!
Edit: Because they don't make it totally clear- whichever one you buy, you can clear all the stock sounds and make any genre of music, regardless of the theming.