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[brian maddox]

Behringer does not make professional level products. They make products targeted at the uninformed church volunteer and weekend warrior that has no budget.

i agree with this assessment.  but...

truth is B* meets a need.  when i was in pro sound, reliability trumped everything, including price, by a wide margin.  and rightly so.  clients [especially corporate ones] really don't want to hear that the broken piece of gear that ruined their presentation was 'a good value'.  now that i'm on staff at a church, those priorities have flip-flopped.  in fact, one of the hardest things for me to get used to has been the tolerance for failure.  i still refuse to accept anything less than perfect, but i'm pretty much the only one in the organization with that attitude.  here, price is the number one consideration, as it should be.  we are spending the hard-earned dollars given to us by good people.  we need to spend wisely.

so, in my new role i have purchased and used quite a few of Uli's products.  and yes, some have failed.  but when i can buy 3 for the price of 1 of the nearest competitor, i'm still well ahead of the game.

all that being said, B*'s business practices still leave me with a bad taste in my mouth...

[Frank DeWitt]

i agree with this assessment.  but...

truth is B* meets a need.  when i was in pro sound, reliability trumped everything, including price, by a wide margin.  and rightly so.  clients [especially corporate ones] really don't want to hear that the broken piece of gear that ruined their presentation was 'a good value'.  now that i'm on staff at a church, those priorities have flip-flopped.  in fact, one of the hardest things for me to get used to has been the tolerance for failure.  i still refuse to accept anything less than perfect, but i'm pretty much the only one in the organization with that attitude.  here, price is the number one consideration, as it should be.  we are spending the hard-earned dollars given to us by good people.  we need to spend wisely.

Interesting,  I to work at a church but we have the opposite point of view. We are spending the hard-earned dollars given to us by good people.  We need to spend wisely. That means quality and it means it can not let us down in the middle of a service.  We still look for value.  We buy used, and have bought gear that was just replaced by a newer model to save money, but we buy quality.

My church has authorized the purchase of back up gear for things that are not redundant anyway.  Example, amps and mics can be moved around, there is (was) only one mixer. and one video computer.

These days a church service without a sound system is not acceptable.   When our Behringer ADA8000 let me down during a Good Friday service it gave me chills as I thought what would happen if it did it on Easter Sunday.   On Easter Sunday it was in the backup rack, now thank God it is gone.  I am embarrassed that I spent money given for Gods work on this stuff.  Never again.

Friends don't let friends buy Behringer

[John Roberts {JR}]

Behringer should get credit for one thing.. It is probably the first company to expose the west to China's standard business practices.. make a cheap copy of something decent and sell it at a fraction of the price.

This too has been discussed ad nauseum.

For the record, the old phrase "Dutch copy", came about from the practice of Dutch artisans making cheat copies of old master's classic artworks.   A couple hundred years later it was the American colonists making cheap copies of European goods. Now a few hundred years later, we're talking about "Chinese copies". 

They flooded our market with dirt cheap products that work(pretty much... most of the time) so the long standing manufacturers had no choice but to follow suit and introduce thier own new lines of dirt cheap products that have all the same corners cut and are sadly.. also mostly built in China, the end result being that overall the bar has been lowered.

Yes mostly, but this is also the natural evolution of a market maturing and getting inefficiencies squeezed out of it.  I have seen several evolutionary transitions as capital pursued cheap labor around the globe (think Japan, Korea, India, China.. next Africa...but wait for it,, they are only now building car factories there).

Ultimately the manufacturers were forced to build in china by the consumers who bought the cheap stuff from others.

I have also been inside mainland chinese factories, building our designs, using parts we specified, to ISO 9000 standards (they even made me put on clean room clothes to go in the soldering area.).  You ultimately get what you pay for, and manage. If you don't mind building disposable gear, you use the cheapest crap parts you can find, and relax build standards.

I reject the claim that all chinese builds are crap... In fact I doubt you can buy anything today without chinese content, parts or subassemblies inside.

Entry level gear costs are lower now than they have ever been but performance and reliability have also been drastically lowered, you wouldn't buy a used Mackie CFX console any more than you would Behringer mixer I hope.. cause they're pretty much the same quality level and who knows how long it will remain 100% functional. Congratulations Uli... that's one hell of an accomplishment.

Yes, entry level product costs have dropped, but so has the cost of all technology. Once upon a time even the cheapest gear you could find easily (like Peavey) was built to a certain standard. Today there are several notches below Peavey, because the market is more mature.

Before long we will see China lose it's place as the low end mfr, and we can repeat this whine about some other country.

US factory workers ARE NOT BETTER THAN CHINESE FACTORY WORKERS... I've seen my share of both... you get what you manage.

JR

PS: The only thing Uli deserves credit for is flogging a very successful business plan, but he gets to live with himself too. I guess money will make that somewhat easier.

[John Chiara]

I am going to have to go with Matt on this one.

I have just replaced my little Behringer home mixer with an Allen&Heath ZED 10FX due to the Behringer totally breaking down right before a party.

Now, I did have the mixer for a few years, but it nearly spoiled a party due to its unreliability (and after all, it was just sitting on a desk ..... how could it just break).

I had to run off and get my MixWiz from our drummers house to save the day. 

I think that Behringer's reputation is well deserved.

Might happen...but I have at least 4 Mixwiz total freak out not worth repairing stories on the past year...2 of them personal.

[Bill Hornibrook]

I think a lot of the criticism leveled at Behringer stems from experience with it's products made before Behringer City - it's own vertically integrated manufacturing facility which come online about 5 years ago.  I own three recent Behringer products: a mixer that I use for a karaoke show and two power amps - and they both give me reliable performance night after night. That's a far cry from a Behringer active crossover that I purchased about 10 years ago, which blew up on me practically the moment I turned it on.

I don't think their stuff is any less reliable than any other MI gear manufactured in China today- and actually may be a little better in that regard.

[Mark G. Hinge]

I’ve used some Behringer gear without issue, mostly earlier in my still-small endeavors, but I don’t think I would consider them for live use in any critical role. 

I have used an EP2500 (pretty sure it’s the same as the new EP4000) amp out, and felt pretty confident in its reliability, but since the QSC GX5 came out, I started using them instead. 

Now I’m going to powered speakers and a digital mixer, and since the Behringer x32 mixer hasn’t actually come out (I would be severely tempted), it seems I’ll be Behringerless. 

As for “business ethics”… meh, sounds like a religion where the preachers don’t even believe their own BS but get the followers all riled up. 

I can objectively say that Uli is a genius, and his competitors who likely subscribe to the same mentality probably salute him, even in their frustration.

Any large successful company is all about maximum profit, and did/does whatever they can get away with.  If they’re doing something seemingly “ethical”, it’s because they can’t get around it, or they’ve gotten big enough where they can afford it, and even then it’s because it all about the bottom line. 

No good guys out there. 

[George Friedman-Jimenez]

US factory workers ARE NOT BETTER THAN CHINESE FACTORY WORKERS... I've seen my share of both... you get what you manage.

US factory workers may not be better than Chinese factory worker, but they are on average healthier and safer. The recent explosions of aluminum dust from polishing iPads in the Chinese Foxconn factories making Apple, Dell and other computer products are a case in point. Not one but two explosions have occurred to date, due to the concentration of aluminum dust in the plant atmosphere being above the minimum explosive concentration, and presumed presence of a spark to set it off. Metal dust concentrations in rooms where humans work should never get that high, and shouldn't even be above No Observable Adverse Effect Levels or other health based standards which are orders of magnitude lower. Occupational health and safety regulatory standards, inadequate and poorly enforced as they are in the US, are even much less protective in China and other countries that specialize in cheap labor. Behringer is only one of many companies driving this race to the bottom in both quality of products and health and safety conditions for the production workers.

To me the most objectionable aspect of Behringer's operation is not the poor quality (for which they have much competition from other companies as previous posters have pointed out) but their blatant ripping off of intellectual property of other companies that did the original R&D and heavy lifting to design the products. To say there are no good guys out there I think is too cynical. Behringer does seem to be a world leader in this unethical behavior. Call me naive for knowingly paying >3x the price for my Ebtech Swizz Army cable tester than I would have paid for a very similar and probably nearly as reliable Behringer ripoff. Could be, I know nothing about the R&D team at Ebtech or the working conditions in their production facilities.

[RYAN LOUDMUSIC JENKINS]

Regardless of what anyone thinks about Behringer's business practices and how that is now used against them by gear snobs as a reason for not liking them, I have seen a totally different angle on it that EVERYONE here seems to ignore or possibly some may just not remember.

Back when Behringer was still manufacturing in Germany you could not buy thier products in certain big box music instrument stores that I will leave un-named.  That chain of stores had many employees talk down about Behringer in every way possible since they didn't sell it.  These same people also talked down about Carvin products too because you could walk across the street and buy the Carvin products direct from Carvin at their retail location.  The campaign worked.  People started to believe that Behringer was terrible.  None of it had anything to do with with their business practices at the time because it was long before most people had any idea that Behringer was using other peoples intellectual property.

Several years later, big box music stores began to sell Behringer products and now everyone still thinks the products are terrible because of all the bad comments made by their employees of the past yet now the employees push the gear on to their customers.

[Frank DeWitt]

My opinion of Behringer is based on personal experience not what I have been told by big box stores or snobs. It is based on recent gear (mfg in 2010) it is based on the exception gear, ADA 8000 and it is 100% bad. 5 out of 5 failures.  It was a bad purchases. I am sorry I did it. I was warned, I have no one to blame but myself.  The experience has motivated me to tell everyone I can.

Friends don't let friends buy Behringer.  I am not affiliated with Behringer in anyway, just a completely dissatisfied former customer.

Frank

[Mike Diack]

I'm not going to be an apologist for Behringer, but I do wonder if just a little of the animosity towards them amongst the pro-audio community is due to the democratisation they have brought to the start up end of their potential market. Every beginner band and cash strapped church that manages to kit itself out with a Behringer rig (due to the low cost) is one less customer through the door for your rental "C" rig or your bottom end sales.
Unreliability is NOT the sole domain of Behringer - the first 18 months or so of Crown iTech sales over here had close to a 100% return rate with some spectacular failures, I have yet to see a B* item with that track record. Many other Crown products (Xti, Xls, CE1k/2k etc) had their fair share of disasters as well - yet you don't see the same level of hatred levelled at Crown - WHY? Is is just that you paid a whole lot more money for these items and don't want to look silly?.
Some years ago, Peavey seemed to be the smelly kid, now its B*.
M

[ProSoundWeb Community]