re: behringer stuff

[dylan <dylanhassinger@yahoo.com>]

i guess i have a somewhat opposing view on behringer
stuff...

i'm a pro audio salesperson at the guitar center in
crestwood, mo. i sell a lot of gear-- behringer, mackie,
alesis, allen & heath, dbx, etc. as a rule, i'm not a fan
of behringer. they rip off other folks' designs, i feel
they rush shoddy stuff to market and then work out the bugs
on the next version, and they don't have as a good quality
control as other brands. that being said, there are some
awesome pieces they make.

for instance, their headphone amps-- awesome. nobody makes
one with the same features. (and since headphone amps come
after the recording stage, it doesn't screw with your
recorded signal.) their cable testers-- badass for the
money. and their compressors seem pretty reliable
(especially the 2-space tube compressor).

but other products of theirs make me frown. i hate their
crossovers-- if you turn the highs ALL the way down,
there's still plenty of signal coming thru, and there's
never enough bass coming out. give me a dbx any day over
that. i don't like their more advanced stuff-- the digital
EQs and other units. their first generation of digital EQs
suffered from dying batteries and oftentimes needed EPROM
updates to work properly. i thinked they worked most of the
bugs out for the new ones, but still... i'm also wary of
their multi-purpose units, like powered mixers. yeah it
works... but for how long?

and then there's the mixers. some customers of mine love
em. but other customers complain of crosstalk, and i have
had more than one situation in which a customer returned a
behringer mixer cuz it had channels that picked up radio
frequencies. i myself recently purchased a used, older
behringer mixer that had very little headroom, and suffered
from nasty digital peak-outs before 4 channels finally just
died on me.

since not all my behringer sales are horror stories, i can
only think that it's a quality control issue-- perhaps they
use the cheapest components available, and sometimes they
get good stuff and sometimes they don't.

i don't have a much better opinion of alesis, either. the
stuff i like to buy is DBX, Allen & Heath, and mackie. yes,
it's more expensive. but it'll be with me forever.

that being said, i'm probably gonna buy a behringer mxb1002
soon for a small live recording rig. but i'm gonna flood it
with signal; we'll see how the headroom fares. and i admit,
for beginners, they're a great bargain.

my 2 cents...

- dylan

p.s. any loopers in the st. louis area, if you need gear,
come talk to me at g.c. in crestwood. you get the "loopers
delight" discount.... =)




        
                
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