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Stephen,
before I go into the details of your message, let me clarify my personal
position in this discussion, to avoid any misunderstandings:
I am not a professional musician. In this context: most of the time, my
gear
resides at home. When it travels to a concert, it does inside a comfy car,
and most of the gigs (of which there have never been more than six in one
year) happen in the immediate sorroundings of my home (up to 1/2h driving).
My gear (including the Behringer gear) has never been subjected to airplane
baggage handling, lenghty road trips in the back of a pickup trucks or
other
means of professional endurance/reliability/stability test. That said:
> (and FCB1010 manuals). A local pro audio repair shop near me
> does a lot of Behringer warranty
> work, a lot of it comes straight from Behringer themselves.
> The amount of gear that goes straight
> into the dumpster is absolutely overwhelming. We're talking
In my close to 10 years of owning Behringer gear, I once had a device break
down: it was their DX3216 console, which completely failed (i.e. wouldn't
boot up) about two days after I got it. The store replaced it. Apart from
that, no problems.
> I feel that the best thing that we can do as a group of
> people is to steer our friends away
> from low quality and towards high quality. [...]
...or towards products with a well-designed feature set. Again, apart from
the price point, the forementioned MX2642A offers a large feature set in a
comparably small package. I can install it on top of my rack, but the
connector plate to the bottom of it, have inserts AND direct outs for 8
channels,... Perhaps it's just that I've been damn lucky with my Behringer
gear, and my experiences are not representative for the majority of the
manufactured devices, but then again, with all the other people complaining
about their stuff, this makes that fact well represented here.
The manuals, btw, aren't as bad in German as they are in the translations.
Never had any problems with them - although their attempt to copy the
Mackie
lingo with some of their newer low-end products sucks. They should've
stayed
with their native prussian style...
Perhaps I have to add that I do not have experience with their super-cheap
mixers. A guy from my Eclectic Blah ensemble has one which seems to suck
ass. Apart from that, my personal ratings (for the devices on which I have
a
detailed opinion):
DX3216 + ADAT Interface: outstanding product! the dynamic and EQ sections
really sound great (my personal opinion).
MX2642(A): the A variant has been a huge improvement over its predecessor.
There are some flaws which make it cumbersome for some applications (like
the lack of XLR outputs), but for the application for which I use it it is
nearly perfect.
FCB1010: well, as if there were any serious competition...
Composer: this is basically the product which established Behringer. And
still a good product if you do not want to spend astronomical amounts of
money on an analogue dynamics processor.
2024P Virtualizer: some of the algorithms are fine (some of the artificial
reverb spaces, the crap vocal algorithms (don't know what they are called),
some are unusable (the Leslie, the amp simulators). A pity it has only a
two-space LED as a display, otherwise, the UI is well designed
hardware-wise, although with some flaws in the implementation in the
software.
Ultramizer: crap. But then again, you get what you pay for (which was
something like ?100 new a decade ago).
Patchbays: don't seem that reliable. I have been using them in a "patch
very
often" kind of setup, and I expect some of the sockets to fail in the
future. But then again, I don't use patchbays anymore.
> [my Fostex]
>
> This is where your argument gets absurd. Which Fostex
> multitrack? Are you sure it's
> superior to *all* portastudio products at that time? Did you
> really try them all? I appreciated
The device was called Fostex 280, and I got it 'round '90. At that time, I
checked the various available products (I think it was Tascam, Yamaha and
Fostex which made integrated multitrackers with mixer and multitrack
cassette recorder) by their specification and then tested the few in the
"upper middle class". I didn't do a proper technical analysis (meaning
carrying a specrum analyzer or noise figure meter into the store), but I
A/Bd them and the Fostex came out best. Some years after that ('95?), I got
my MX2642 and found out that, yes, it was a vast improvement. Hence my
conclusion that it is in fact superior to the portastudios of the '90 time.
Note that the Tascam 6xx series hadn't been released back then.
Rainer
ps: yes, I also do have a Mackie...
Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill
Moinlabs GFX and Soundworks - www.moinlabs.de
The Straschill Family Group - www.straschill.de
digital penis expert group - www.dpeg.de
Eclectic Blah - www.eblah.de