Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II review: worth getting in 2025?

In late 2023, Teenage Engineering, Sweden’s premier vibe merchant and synth maker, found itself in a somewhat jarring position. Its much-anticipated portable polyphonic sampler, the EP-133 K.O. II, had just entered the ring and was a smash hit. Simultaneously, the company was getting pummelled over ‘fadergate’ – a host of build quality issues that incensed the devoted user base.

We’re now a year or so down the road. As the dust, and hype, have settled, it’s worth stepping back to evaluate the EP-133 K.O. II with a clear head. Does it have staying power? Or is it a one-round wonder?

One of the key draw cards for the EP-133 K.O. II, as with its ancestor, the PO-33 KO!, is the fun factor. From its premium packaging to its cartoony instruction manual, there’s a well-honed playfulness here that says ‘I’m serious about not taking myself seriously’. Poor packaging and delivery practices were at the heart of the much-publicised damage to faders, the speaker, and other parts of the device that we saw on first release; this certainly appears to have been solved and the review unit arrived safe and sound, swaddled in bubble wrap.

An all-plastic exterior is realised in Game Boy-esque shades of grey, with an LED panel populated by obscure but charming icons. And instead of pads, it sports 12 velocity-sensitive mechanical switch keys that make jamming a rhythm feel more like beating up on a faulty typewriter. All of this comes in a portable form factor that gets about 20 hours of playtime from just four triple-A batteries, has a built-in speaker and microphone, and weighs in at just 620g.

It may appear toy-like, but as you start using the EP-133 K.O. II things begin to feel much more grown up. The workflow centres on four groups. Each of these can be loaded with up to 12 samples and each can hold their own sequence (referred to as patterns). Recording patterns live or step-by-step is simple enough, and once you’ve got a groove going, hitting the ‘Commit’ function copies everything you’ve made into a new ‘Scene’ – this is the process by which you can start building up variations.

Something that feels even more grown up is the learning curve. Even if you’re an intermediate user of samplers, getting to grips with the EP-133 K.O. II feels much like learning a new instrument. There are plenty of multi-button combinations to learn if you want to access its full capabilities, and this necessitates a regular back and forth between the hardware and the instruction manual until features are embedded into muscle memory. But once you get over that initial hump the reward is a creative, energising groove box packed with nifty features.

You can sample via the microphone or line input and then use the Chop feature to automatically map these across an entire keygroup. You can record patterns unquantised and then, after entering Time Correction mode, you can punch in quantisation for individual notes. In a concept borrowed from the Pocket Operator range, there are a variety of ‘Push Effects’, such as stutters, bit crushing, and time warps that can be slapped on during performance, all adding hugely to the musicality of the instrument. There’s also a looper whose length and position can be adjusted for scrubbing and a key mode that maps any sample melodically across 12 pitches.

Speaking of samples, a factory selection of 300+ sounds broadly covers drums, bass, and melody. You can fine-tune the start and end points for these and set the pitch, envelope, and play mode – one-shot, legato, or gated – from the Sound Edit menu.

Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O.II. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech — Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech

One complaint at launch was the inability to easily back up the unit’s factory samples to a computer. This issue has thankfully been addressed by firmware upgrades, along with workflow improvements for copying and pasting patterns, setting loop lengths, overdub recording, and a host of minor bug fixes. There’s also an effective web-based sample management tool that lets you drag and drop files from your computer and quickly map them across keys.

All in all, there are 999 slots available for samples – which sounds fantastic until you consider the unit’s paltry storage space. Having 64 megabytes of storage on a sampler with close to a thousand sample slots felt like a bad joke in 2023, and it certainly hasn’t gotten any funnier in 2025. For a device that encourages you to load or record in your own audio, this amount of storage is just silly, and, by comparison, the Ableton Move sports 64 gigabytes of memory as well as three times as many factory samples.

Once you start noticing the EP-133 K.O. II’s shortcomings, they come thick and fast. As a place to jam out ideas it excels – but refining those creative bursts, or even just slotting them into a larger workflow, is full of trade-offs.

You can record patterns up to a whopping 99 bars long, but there’s no song mode for chaining patterns together. The Push Effects are incredibly fun but can’t be recorded as part of a pattern, while the send effects sound excellent but can’t be applied to individual samples, only to entire groups. There’s a good selection of in/out options to connect other hardware devices, but audio output is limited to a stereo line out.

True, at £299 it’s one of the few offerings in Teenage Engineering’s product lineup with an accessible price point, but with such strong competition on the market, the EP-133 K.O. II is increasingly hard to recommend. If you’re looking for an ultra-portable idea pad then Ableton’s Move has a better build quality and a workflow that seamlessly integrates with Live. For serious music-makers looking for a powerhouse, Roland’s SP-404 MkII offers amazing versatility and far more sculpting options for roughly £60 more.

If there’s one area where the EP-133 K.O. II still reigns supreme, it’s style. That may sound silly when talking about a hardware sampler, but it’s actually not. Teenage Engineering has picked an aesthetic and followed it all the way through to the end. The result is an instrument that feels unserious in the best possible way; cool, quirky, surprising, often awkward, but always fun. You will want to play this thing, and that matters.

It’s also worth noting that this sampler has plenty of fans. Many see its idiosyncrasies as creatively stimulating and its high-concept aesthetics as irresistible. It’s why artists like Azealia Banks routinely praise Teenage Engineering’s approach to hardware design, K.O. II included.

However, this sampler rests too heavily on its admittedly good looks. Style can’t cover awkward feature navigation, a steep learning curve, and tiny storage. EP-133 K.O. II’s limitations are beginning to feel decidedly claustrophobic.