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[TJ (Tom) Cornish]

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

Crown lost a lot of face on those particular issues too. I'm personally Harman-free as well as Behringer-free at the moment. I will always be Behringer-free for the many good reasons in this thread. I won't turn my nose up at ITech HDs though, because they don't suck. I have contemplated buying used ITech originals, but have decided to pass and either get tried and true QSC on the no DSP end or hold out for the ITechHDs (or a manufacturer-specified box if I change speaker systems) if I want DSP in the box.

[Mark G. Hinge]

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that anyone is less than honest, but having owned Behringer gear and knowing/reading of plenty who have, when I hear of someone saying they’ve had a number of B products with near 100% failure, I have to wonder what’s up with that.

Over a decade ago one could only have things built in China, as opposed to building it there themselves and directly controlling the quality, but things have changed drastically since then.

Maybe some of these experiences have been from that time, maybe some B products aren’t/weren’t able to take the harsher handling of some…

I don’t know what to think, but I just can’t understand such conflicting experiences as I’ve read.

[g'bye, Dick Rees]

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that anyone is less than honest, but having owned Behringer gear and knowing/reading of plenty who have, when I hear of someone saying they’ve had a number of B products with near 100% failure, I have to wonder what’s up with that.

Certain of their products or production runs have had a significantly high BOB failure rate.  Not all do and not all have.  But what percentage of dead on delivery items is acceptable?  5%, 10%, 50%???

I've had and used certain of the B*** products and found them useful.  I've also had them come out of the box in non-working condition.  Not the same products/models I use, but some that should have fulfilled a niche need.  These were generally for low-rate system installs for churches and such.  I just gave up on B*** as a brand for other people as even if they worked initially, the number of service calls and replacements was just not acceptable.  The initial savings were more than eaten up by a bad product run or a poor design.

   

[Chris Davis]

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.

Hmm..  That's kind of an oddball red herring.  I must admit this thread is chock full of every red herring imaginable, possibly in an attempt to pry our attention away from the central issue of IP theft?

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. 

Don't know who you are referring to, but in my world no means no.

No good guys out there.

Really??




So is there any reason why I should carry B* gear?  Maybe I should carry it for "diversity" purposes, or to show that I'm not a gear snob??   

P.S. I probably won't be replying any more to this thread.  Too many tangents and wrong turns to follow.  In the end I find it to be a boring topic that ultimately leads to nowhere.  There is a group of us, though, who are bothered by the IP theft issue above all else.

[Ivan Beaver]

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

I was doing a gig a number of years ago for a once very famous band.

We had KT DN360's on the monitors.  One of them started "acting flaky" and making some odd noises.

The monitor guy said "They do that sometimes"-just bypass it.  We did and he was happy.

HOW IF I had used a Peavey or a DOD as the eq-he would have been throwing a fit-even if they were working just fine.

But SOMEHOW it is OK to have a well know respectful brand just sitting there and NOT working, than to have a "cheaper" brand and be working just fine.

That has always amazed me.

To add to the comments-Crest has also had its own major failures.  Back in the 80's they came out with the Proline 400 and 300 amps.
I was the bench tech at a music store that sold them.  We had almost 3/4 of them fail-many right out of the box. 

The boss told me to stop repairing them and he was going to make Crest send replacement modules and all I had to do was to put them in.  It seemed that every module I got had a "new modification" done to it.

And then we won't talk about the Crest LT amps that I used on installs for a little while.  Until we started getting calls because the amps literaly caught on fire and they had to call the fire dept and the room was evacuated-even though the amps were in a different room.

But you don't hear talking about Crest the way they do Behringer-or Peavey etc.

I loved how one customer tried to "prove" that Peavey was poorly built.  He said-Go into any repair shop and see how much Peavey gear is there as compared to other brands.  That somehow "proved" to him that the sutff was poorly built-not reliable etc.

OK, I will give him the "causual" observance.

HOWEVER-when you consider the wide range of products Peavey built-and how much of it was sold (MANY times more than other gear).

My experience in repairing Peavey gear is that it is pretty easy to fix-relatively inexpensive to fix and built very well.

Now remember that this is soley based on my experiences up until the end of the last decade.

I honestly feel the reason Peavey gets such a bad rap is not so much the gear-but rather the inexperience user who typically uses it-and gets a bad end result.

I actually had a BE tell me once that I HAD to remove the Peavey Autograph that was in my rack.  I was not using it as an eq, ONLY as a RTA.  I told him I would turn it off.  That is NOT good enough.  He insisted that all Peavey gear "contaminated the ground" and caused buzzing in systems.  Unplugging was good enough either-it had to be physically removed.  I'm surprised that he didn't complain that it as "radiating" bad carma just being near the rack. HA-HA

 It's not the arrow-it's the Indian.

[brian maddox]

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.

you and i are actually pretty much on the same page here.  all my sunday morning service mission critical stuff is 'real' gear [Shure UHFR, QSC, EV, Yamaha Digital mixers, that kind of thing].  i am, in fact, a stickler for reliability [which is why i've been a yamaha fanboy since the 90's].  but i do use B* gear in some of my less critical applications, like kid's classrooms and the like.  and i've got a bunch of the ADA8000's in my monitor rig and my multi-track rig.  i've had a couple failures [due to power spikes in our building], but the cost of replacing them with even presonus gear would be prohibitive.

i understand being reticent to buy Uli's gear.  in truth, i'm a bit reticent myself.  but for non-critical applications, or non-essentials [like my in-ear processor] it's still a reasonably good option.  at least for us...

[John Roberts {JR}]

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.

That would be convenient but I seriously doubt it.

I have had at least one contract manufacturer in common with them before Behringer City was built and that CM was very professional...

The CM builds with the parts you specify... Garbage in = garbage out... While I don't have first hand information I have heard rumors (that I believe) of problems with production runs not even getting out of the factory because of sub standard parts specified, and a pissing match over who takes the loss for unsellable product. (Chinese are not very big on lawyers and suing to resolve contract disputes).

Kind of makes me feel sorry for the CM who as I understand it stopped building stuff for them, after getting stiffed.   

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.

Opinions vary... It surely isn't as bad as some posters suggest or they couldn't make a profit. I don't doubt that many people have had bad experiences with them.

I have seen similar reliability from Chinese builds and US builds of the exact same product design, built using the exact same parts, just an ocean away.

Like I said before you get what you manage. If you just throw some design over the wall and don't pay attention, you may get surprised, but that happens when the factory is 25 miles away too... (I know).

JR

[John Roberts {JR}]

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.

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.

You're just telling me you must have lived in CA?

In much of the country Carvin wasn't a factor in any market.

Behringers early German gear was fairly well respected studio rack gear, not cheap mass market everyman does everything gear.

Something you may not remember since I don't know if this was widely known, but Behringers big mixer program was bankrolled on orders from one big box company (Ash).  "Take this (Mackie 8 bus console), build them in China for cheap, and we'll buy a SH__ load from you.."  the rest is how you say history, but Uli figured out pretty quick he didn't need to share all that profit with the big box guy who got him started in the console business.   

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.

After he fell out with their initial sugar daddy/distribution, it was Behringer distributing their own products to anybody with a pulse. Since they copied a lot of mackie's marketing too, they were merchandising direct to the end user, and the dealer was just a middle man servicing the customer demand created by advertising.

Low priced entry level gear, is pejoratively viewed, that just goes with the price point, but with the volume of product that people have first hand experience with by now, there is little need to put too much weight on incorrect assumptions or opinions.

It is what it is...  If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a kitten.

JR

[g'bye, Dick Rees]

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's not a kitten.

JR

I've got a cat that can quack like a duck, though.....

[Scott Bolt]

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

I am not saying that it is impossible for a MixWiz to have an issue.  I am saying that it is a much much much more reliable piece of gear than any Behringer mixer.

I have not heard of any stories like you have quoted and most people who own them (including me) have had excellent results with them with very high reliability.

What kinds of issues did you have with your MixWiz?

[ProSoundWeb Community]