Most of the other equipment manufacturers are exploiting cheap Chinese labor but they charge like it's made in Europe or the US. Take the UAD Apollo, real quality, high tech stuff right? No, made in China.

 

To equate made in China with poor quality is a thinking error.

UAD Apollo can buy its parts for hardware all over the world. China is a low-wage country, with the most advanced machinery and know-how to assemble anything. If the Chinese lack something, they buy it on the world market. They themselves have enough well-educated workers and company founders from the universities.

The company has only moved the production from Europe to China to be able to compete with the competition.

 

www.laenderdaten.info/durchschnittseinkommen.php

 

They have released almost 30 products (judging by the ones listed at Thomann) in 2022 alone, and it's just March.

Korg in all of 2021 had just 5 (7, if you count different sizes of the Nautilus as separate products), and nothing in 2022 yet.
Roland so far in 2022 has like 2 (+2 other keyboard sizes of Fantom-0X, +1 Juno 60 Chorus in software), plus little things like a gooseneck microphone or a battery for portable amplifiers.

Literally nobody is making this much stuff, and such ridiculously low prices and with worldwide availability.

The only people who have been exploited or ripped off are the ones who failed to provide good enough value for the customer and settled on their brand name being enough to justify buying mediocre products. People are free to choose whichever brand they prefer, the fact that Behringer is ranked #1 by number of products sold, of all manufacturers on Thomann tells you who they prefer.

On their top 50 products of last 30 days there's 4x Shure, 3x Focusrite, 4x Yamaha, yet 6x Behringer. There's a reason why people buy it, the X32 has basically owned the whole live show marked, the XR18 has wiped out all the Soundcraft options, and their synths are laughably cheap while being actually synths and not pocket-sized garbage plugins in the box from Roland.

He didn't get the factories in China from the Chinese people for free, out of their kindness. And his market power comes from years of releasing products that are good enough to do the job at prices unheard of before. Everyone else is free to make better products (in China if you like) and overthrow his market power. That takes real work and effort, and simply dismissing that is just pathetic.

 

Somewhat agreed here, it's definitely a hot potato, but they already have multiple teams from the companies they own. Behringer stuff is designed by the Midas team, and includes software copied straight from TC Electronic. It sounds more like they wanted a known working base for the software, since they know developing a DAW from scratch will be no easy task, and it's cheaper to buy code and modify it to get what you need, rather than pay for years of work from the ground up.

They already mentioned it's being done by the TC Electronic team, who already do software, both embedded and software plugins. If anything, I'm glad they give it to someone who won't be learning from zero as they go.

 

Like, good products and not having a brand name that allows you to sell mediocre stuff at inflated prices like the others?

Every other manufacturer is free to use extremely aggressive marketing strategies and relocate to China. Audient have just as aggressive marketing strategies (if not more, judging by the amount of sponsored videos and articles all over the internet), and make their stuff in China (iD4 MKII for example), yet they are nowhere near being a worldwide superpower like Behringer.

X32? P16 and P2? XR18? Deepmind12? Neutron? Model D? These are all exceptional performance products at a ridiculously low price that turned out to change the whole industry forever (look no further than X32 and P2 being the most popular setup for live shows worldwide, their cheap mixers being used by a shockingly large group of gigging musicians for mixing between themselves and the aux feed on in-ears, or XR18 being the de facto standard for smaller gigs and band rehearsal rooms, or P16 being *the* personal mixer used in top-tier studios).

Just like Apple. It's not like they stand next to the workers and mistreat them, these are local Chinese manufacturing companies that they outsource to. You know only so much about what's happening, until it breaks out to the news. Even if you visit the place in person, they'll put on a show for you, and go to business as usual as you leave. Tracing this is hard, and you can't really have someone on-site monitoring the workers 24/7.

Yet X32 continues to be the most popular board in live sound worldwide, and X32 Rack continues to be the piece to get for multitrack recording and monitoring onstage.

 

Excuse me, that's Roland's business model. They sell hardware with 20% of the content included, and the remaining 80% is in-app purchases these days. This includes things like additional drum machines and synthesizer models that should have been onboard at the release date to begin with

 

As far as I can see, all Behringer 2022 new entries are nothing more than cheap speakers, usb microphones, $ 20 headphones ... Thanks, I don't feel the need for it. Probably a lot of those products aren't even built by Music Tribe, I suspect it's just re-branded junk. Where's the real stuff? Where is the gear that has made the Behringer brand famous in recent years?

This is the list of clones announced by Uli as "coming soon":
(year of announcement in brackets)

• Ub-Xa (2018)
• DS 80 (2019)
• PPG Wave (2020)
• Ms-5 (2021)
• Pro-800 (2021)
• Polyeight (2021)
• Pro 16 (2021)
• TD-3-MO (2021)
• LM Drum (2021)
• RSF Kobol (2021)
• Proton (2022)

Until this gear appears in the real world, I will consider it 100% hardvaporware, now feel free to add this new DAW to this list

 

The microphone is 1/3 of the price of other options from Audio-Technica and Rode, and aimed at mounting directly to a camera.

There's Studio L and XL which now include MIDAS preamps (while Control2USB had no mic inputs, just TRS line in), one more stereo input (5/6) with a 3.5mm aux in jack at the front, the ability to use an external talkback mic. Basically they extended the monitor controller into a full-blown audio interface, 2x2 or 2x4 depending on the variant.

They also have the 1050 and 1027 sequencers from ARP 2500 series, a MIDI-CV module, Brains (digital oscillator), the TD-3 with Devilfish mods added, RD-8 MKII, in-ear monitors at half the price of Shure SE215s...

If you don't feel a need for the products, fine, but it's not like they are not delivering.

I'm yet to see any OEM/re-branded stuff sold by Behringer. It takes money to buy from someone else and resell further, and if you're already selling at rock bottom prices you can't really afford to do that, you know.

What's "real stuff"? Because the gear that made Behringer famous is the X32, XR18, Deepmind12, P16, P2 and Wing - all widely available and used on stages and in studios worldwide.

That one is already out, multiple reviews from 5-20 March 2022 on Thomann, currently waiting 8-10 weeks for a restock

from GS:

In Jun 2021 they posted a video that the design is completed. From there they need to order a big enough batch of parts (which is not easy given commonly used chips, like STM32 microcontrollers are $7.50-$9 each instead of their $4.90 list price, and nobody has them in stock, with expected restock in 53 weeks, or just over a year). And they can't just get 100 of them, they need thousands, otherwise people like you bitch on forums.

Apart from chips, you need to prepare and send all the design files to your plastic parts manufacturers, metalworking facilities, prepare the print that goes onto the metalwork, etc. From a finished design to manufacturing there's still a lot of work to be done. Back in Jun 2021 they mentioned:

Note "manufacturing planning". They're gathering what they need to make hundreds or thousands of them, otherwise they couldn't sell it without making the price vastly different, or would have to scrap the whole product outright.

Same with the others. For some of these it's just a 3D render in a computer that they possibly haven't even started working on - just posting to social media and looking at what's in most demand = what to work on first. Pretty sure they wanted to do TD-3, RD-9 and RD-8 before they took on something like a PPG Wave or DS-80.

Remember this is a single team in Manchester, UK. I wouldn't be surprised if all the synths were done by 10-20 people, and as Uli mentioned they do it in their free time, while also designing other Behringer, Midas and TC Electronic hardware.

 

@Qrchack
I try to summarize what you say:

• All Behringer products have exceptional performances
• Gear release dates are all on time
• The copyright circumvention allegations are fake news
• Sneaky marketing techniques are actually appreciable
• The exploitation of Chinese employees is irrelevant (everyone does it)

Basically Uli Behringer is a hero and anyone who dares to be critical is completely wrong
Did I get your point right?

 

In your opinion, then, all companies are heroes and what they do is all acceptable. I am rather a friend of cooperatives, where everyone gets the same and also has equal rights. You're talking capitalism into the bargain. The greed for profit and profit maximization is the cause of many injustices.

 

Last edited: Apr 1, 2022

Not quite, though they vastly perform above anything else released by their competitors, even at 2-4x the price - or in some cases there's straight up no better competitor available. Look no further than TR-808/909 only offered in Boutique by Roland, or Korg's take on ARP 2600.

They are not. Neither are Roland's or Korg's given the current availability of parts used by all of them.

Is there any reason for you the consumer to care about copyright and profits of a company, instead of getting a quality product at a fair price?

Marketing is just that. Marketing. Couldn't give less fucks about Facebook drama, as long as the goods are delivered

 

I strongly disagree with what you say, but just for today, I let you have your own opinion

 

Behringer DAW will be a clone of Harrison Mixbus which is based on Ardour
DAWception

 

In fact, exploiting the open-source, and already very advanced Ardour project could be a very smart move for a company this big. But I very doubt that Uli could be THAT smart.

 

Harrison already did exploit it for Mixbus32C

 

The one on my desk is confused by your "vaporware" claim.

As for the rest, there's only so much they can do with worldwide chip shortage.

 

TD-3MO has never been sold on a continuous basis in the US, every now and then just a bunch of them pop up. Until it's really available I will continue to consider it vaporware.
Chip shortage is not a new concept: we have been talking about this problem for at least 2 years, but Uli continued with his teasing game as if the problem did not exist. Since the problem does exists, it would be best to keep his mouth shut until having the chips in the factory.
Uli is indefensible, his useless blabbing can still convince you, but not me. At the moment, all the Behringer clones present on the market were designed 4 years ago and we will probably have to wait another 4 years for the ones announced today. Any other promise will be lost in time, like tears in rain

 

I've stood on the back deck of a Behringer supply track for the Music Tribes Camps with sweat in my eyes watching Behringer fanboys fight on the forums of gearspace

 

They did an 180 with their synths because they put genuine specialists in charge, so who knows - always hope for the best

To the people who tagged my post as interesting: It was just a joke lol