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[David Hayes]

The band I was in before I started this one had a brand new Behringer PMP2000 powered mixer.  We used it once in practice and once on a gig.  Second song, second set it committed suicide.  No back up.  Never again.

[Randall Hyde]

First thing, I know probably because of build quality or longevity and such but seriously, is there ANY bad part about the sound of a Behringer mixer or compressor or EQ? Cause so many people have said to stay away from them but for build reasons. I've owned many Behringer products and NEVER have they broke on me, maybe I'm just lucky but still. I prefer my Behringer EP4000s for my subs instead of a Crown Macrotech, I like the sound better and sounds "tighter". Especially for live bands.

Well, I've read the comments up to this point.
I agree with many, don't particularly feel as strongly about others.

Like many ankle biters, when I started out around 10 years ago the price of Behringer gear was very attractive. I bought a pre-Chinese 32-channel mixing board back then that I still use to this day to mix the sound from several computer systems in my office into a single set of powered speakers.

I have several Behringer DI units. Bought in the days when $30 seemed a whole lot better than $200 for a unit. Sound quality, they're okay (I'm sure many around here would respectively disagree). However, they are falling apart (buttons falling off, etc.). They're fine for a "B" rig. Replacing them with Radial units for my "A" rig as the acts that use that rig generally don't want Behringer gear (my current "B" rig gets rented by local acts who generally think Behringer is okay).

I have a rack-mount Behringer mixer I needed for a gig once (Behringer makes okay "one-use-only" products). The preamps suck and it's noisy, but I've been using it for "speakers on sticks" jobs for a couple of years now).
 
However, my "good" experience with Behringer ends with those units.
I'd bought some Behringer 4-channel compressors. Even back then (before I knew much), they sounded very electronic and crappy.  Feedback was difficult to control when using those units.

I had a Behringer feedback suppression unit; it was useless; sold it on eBay.

I've had small mixers from Behringer. Had the wall-wart power supply blow up on them.

For the past 5 years, I've done this month-long gig outdoors every December. For the first three years I purchased a PMP-3000 powered mixer. After a month of use, buttons were falling off, knobs were noisy, faders were starting to fail. Crappy preamps (very little gain until the 5:00 position, then instant feedback and lots of hiss), but audio quality wasn't a priority. At the end of the gig, I'd use the PMP for speakers on sticks gigs, then sell it off and get a new one the next year.

That was great until after the third year. I purchased a new PMP-3000 several months prior to the December gig (April actually) for a speakers on sticks gig I had. It died two hours into the show. Took the unit back to GC (bought it two days previously) and replaced it with a new unit. A couple of months later, one of my sound guys borrowed it for his wife's show. The amps blew up just before the show. It took six weeks to get it repaired. When the December gig rolled around, I shelved the PMP and switched over to a SAC system with Crown amps.

Maybe if I were in a garage band doing cheap gigs, Behringer would be acceptable. My experience with Behringer's reliability tells me that it doesn't belong in any mission-critical application. When I do use Behringer gear, I make sure I have a backup.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde

[John Roberts {JR}]

The IP theft is, to me, obvious -- it appears that Behringer mixers are designed in Woodinville, Washington. But putting that aside and looking at the reliability issue...

The stories of reliability (or lack thereof) are all anecdotal. I know of no study that has tracked the product reliability of several brands, product lines, and products, with comparison to actual production numbers.

Such study if done formally is done for internal use only and not published. We did this at Peavey before extending the warranty from 3 years to 5 years (IIRC). The reality about all these reports of DOA and 100% failure rates are most surely anecdotal outliers, as no company could stay in business experiencing that much rework and repair.

That said where there is so much smoke, expect to find a little fire. Building product and shipping half way around the world before first use, requires robust engineering, quality components, and attention to detail. I recall decades ago when European manufacturers operated 100% QA inspections here after their product came off the boat. Professional customers expect new product to work (and old product too).

We have been conditioned to expect that "Brand B" is junk and "Brand P" used to be junk but now isn't so bad, and "Brand S" is hot stuff. So naturally, when our Brand B board loses it's magic smoke, our friends say "I told you so" but when the Brand S board fails, we say it's an isolated incident. But is it really? We can't know that without knowing such statistics as mean time before failure.

Further, we have to consider production volumes. If Brand B sells ten times as many processors as Brand R, is it unreasonable to hear ten times as many failure reports among Brand B users as opposed to Brand R users?

+1  Peavey has dealt with this criticism before from people challenged by simple math.

But this thread has strayed far away from the OP's question. Buried in the first post was the question of sound quality: aside from the IP, aside from the reliability, aside from the manufacturing practices, what do you like/not like about the sound quality of Behringer products?

For myself, I have some Behringer products. Some of them have failed; the price is such that repair isn't worth it. I can't say that similar products from another manufacturer would be more reliable. Some of them are still in use (I don't do this professionally). They fill a need. I have found the sound quality to be acceptable for my acts, venues, and applications.

I once had a Behringer mini mixer. Horribly designed. It was powered by a wall wart which would fry without a load, so if you unplugged it from the mixer before unplugging it from the wall, that's the end of that. It wasn't just me, there were many, many reports of the same issue. Really, it wasn't the mixer's fault, it was the design of the power supply, which Behringer most likely did not design but sourced it from another supplier as a somewhat off-the-shelf part.

The sound of a mixer depends on measurable performance metrics and ergonomic factors that influence perception. This is too complex to investigate here.
---
I am not so quick to give them a pass on the PS.. I have specified and purchased many lumps and wall warts. Rather than fry it probably has some internal protection device that trips. The failure mechanism is perhaps a DC supply with regulator that oscillates? or unregulated DC supply whose no-load voltage breaks down an under rated reservoir capacitor, if it's an AC supply I don't have a guess, but I'll take your word for it.
------
I have also experience a problem with purchasing employees when they become more motivated by cost savings than product performance, to find components so cheap they don't work.  I once had to do a trial production run in the factory using 1000 pcs of a too cheap to work potentiometer (less than $0.10 ), to prove whether my judgement was correct or not.. You can imagine on a mixer with tens of pots per PCB, that it doesn't take a very high failure rate to get 0% good boards. After bending over backwards to prove my point, the purchasing agent got mad at me, because his new vendor's crap parts didn't work, and he didn't get his cost saving reward.

Trust me these inferior parts are out there, and somebody is using them. However parts that bad rarely get used twice. I guess a question to ask is what does a company do with a production run using these parts after they discover the low reliability. Some companies might be inclined to just make them work and ship them, essentially kicking the short term problem over the wall, and collecting the revenue for good sales. (caveat this is pure speculation on my part, but could explain single batches of flaky product mixed in with mostly working product.). It cost money and profit to eat your mistakes. The cheaper the product the less margin you have to work with. 

JR

[Ivan Beaver]

. The cheaper the product the less margin you have to work with. 

JR

The old "race to the bottom" that so many companies compete in.

[John Roberts {JR}]

I am not calling anybody a duck here but I hear what sounds like quacking.

The product is designed to hold the low ground (low price point). Since just about everybody is building in China these days without the overhead of building their own major production complex*, you do the math.

JR

* this is a simplified analysis... vertical integration means they capture the profit margin made by contract manufacturers, but this margin was low single digits (from my experience years ago).  The costs of having many captive employees in China is not as much as here. In China you build a dormitory for them to sleep in and charge them rent. Like the old company mining towns we had here hundreds of years ago (but even cheaper). Note: Factory complexes are not build in populous cities but in the country, and workers are drawn from even further away (the poor North), thus the need for dormitories.   

[Iain.Macdonald]

Oh no! Another let's hate/bash/praise Behringer thread. I'm quite sure that these are planted by their competitors. Or it's a fiendishly clever bit of weird psychology.

Why is anybody, who uses audio gear to make a living, using lowest cost MI product? At no time have Behringer, or Peavey etc ever marketed their product as big time Pro. You can add Samson(Sam Ash), Presonus, Mackie, Alesis, Numark, Phonic, and many others. You can buy a diversity wireless mic kit, on legal frequencies, for less than $30. Does it work? Yes, in the el-cheapo bedroom DJ market it was intended for. That's really the point, it's intended market.

With regard to IP. American patent law allows Americans to disregard prior art elsewhere. Many USA based companies are getting a shock, as the rest of the world begins to follow American practices. How many Pro Audio companies can say they haven't had people making prior art claims against them, or claims on trade dress(look) etc? Much of this is an attempt at restraining competitors, and/or playing the my lawyer/my legal insurance is bigger than yours. Ever wondered why so many MI products have the same circuits. At the bottom end of the market, much of the MI product circuitry, is just the application diagram that came from the IC manufacturer.

Regarding reverse engineering, That has long been taught in American Universities, and it's an established business practice. Anybody who develops a product in isolation from the market, is just clueless.

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.

Oooh. Does that mean that corporate America is just useless, and everybody should just give up? Absolutely not! Now that the HCUA is reconstituted under the guise of Homeland Security, expect a visit. Hee Hee!  Surely, your comment "you get what you manage" should be...you manage what you get. Poor workers are a failure of management.

Iain.

[Sam Carlen]

Well I can see a lot of people have had problems here, but you know, I must've gotten lucky. And other people seem to question my honesty with that. Well that's why I asked this question in the first place, I've gotten lucky and never had to replace anything besides one thing. And they gave me a brand new one and worked fine until this day. I guess considered the hatred of Behringer with so many people, if something craps out, I won't buy it again. But so far nothing has, so I think I'm pretty good for now. Though I am replacing the Behringer SX2442FX with a Yamaha MG32/14FX, not because it's not working or good. Just because I need something bigger and supposedly "more reliable". But thanks everyone.

[Sam Carlen]

Well, I've read the comments up to this point.
I agree with many, don't particularly feel as strongly about others.

Like many ankle biters, when I started out around 10 years ago the price of Behringer gear was very attractive. I bought a pre-Chinese 32-channel mixing board back then that I still use to this day to mix the sound from several computer systems in my office into a single set of powered speakers.

I have several Behringer DI units. Bought in the days when $30 seemed a whole lot better than $200 for a unit. Sound quality, they're okay (I'm sure many around here would respectively disagree). However, they are falling apart (buttons falling off, etc.). They're fine for a "B" rig. Replacing them with Radial units for my "A" rig as the acts that use that rig generally don't want Behringer gear (my current "B" rig gets rented by local acts who generally think Behringer is okay).

I have a rack-mount Behringer mixer I needed for a gig once (Behringer makes okay "one-use-only" products). The preamps suck and it's noisy, but I've been using it for "speakers on sticks" jobs for a couple of years now).
 
However, my "good" experience with Behringer ends with those units.
I'd bought some Behringer 4-channel compressors. Even back then (before I knew much), they sounded very electronic and crappy.  Feedback was difficult to control when using those units.

I had a Behringer feedback suppression unit; it was useless; sold it on eBay.

I've had small mixers from Behringer. Had the wall-wart power supply blow up on them.

For the past 5 years, I've done this month-long gig outdoors every December. For the first three years I purchased a PMP-3000 powered mixer. After a month of use, buttons were falling off, knobs were noisy, faders were starting to fail. Crappy preamps (very little gain until the 5:00 position, then instant feedback and lots of hiss), but audio quality wasn't a priority. At the end of the gig, I'd use the PMP for speakers on sticks gigs, then sell it off and get a new one the next year.

That was great until after the third year. I purchased a new PMP-3000 several months prior to the December gig (April actually) for a speakers on sticks gig I had. It died two hours into the show. Took the unit back to GC (bought it two days previously) and replaced it with a new unit. A couple of months later, one of my sound guys borrowed it for his wife's show. The amps blew up just before the show. It took six weeks to get it repaired. When the December gig rolled around, I shelved the PMP and switched over to a SAC system with Crown amps.

Maybe if I were in a garage band doing cheap gigs, Behringer would be acceptable. My experience with Behringer's reliability tells me that it doesn't belong in any mission-critical application. When I do use Behringer gear, I make sure I have a backup.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde

Hi Randy, just curious. Was that pre-chinese mixer the MX9000 I believe it's called? Cause I've seem them used for years and still work apparently.

[Iain.Macdonald]

Well I can see a lot of people have had problems here, but you know, I must've gotten lucky. And other people seem to question my honesty with that. Well that's why I asked this question in the first place, I've gotten lucky and never had to replace anything besides one thing. And they gave me a brand new one and worked fine until this day. I guess considered the hatred of Behringer with so many people, if something craps out, I won't buy it again. But so far nothing has, so I think I'm pretty good for now. Though I am replacing the Behringer SX2442FX with a Yamaha MG32/14FX, not because it's not working or good. Just because I need something bigger and supposedly "more reliable". But thanks everyone.

"A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows public opinion"  Chinese proverb

Take your life in your own hands and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. Erica Jong

[Russ Davis]

... Was that pre-chinese mixer the MX9000 I believe it's called? Cause I've seem them used for years and still work apparently.

I've briefcased on both the MX8000 (IIRC this was the Mackie lawsuit one, sans meter bridge) and the MX9000 (with meter bridge) several years ago.  Both were Chinese made, and both suffered from dead channels, crosstalk and LEDs that seemed to have a mind of their own.  Neither board had many hours on it.  Likewise, I've guested on systems with B'ger EQs, gates, and the dreaded Virtualizer, and also encountered dead channels, random LEDs and weird noises.

Strangely, the one piece of Behringer gear I own has been totally reliable.  Before I knew any better, I picked up one of their few original designs, the MX2442a Eurodesk.  Other than it being silver (blinding to look at outdoors!) I've had no issues with it.  I even used it for the Texas Junior Miss finals one year, before retiring it out of fear that my luck might run out (or potential clients might start laughing at it).

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