StageConnect is a connection to transmit 32 uncompressed audio-channels via a single XLR cable. StageConnect is based on A2B, the Automotive Audio Bus (A2B).
Behringer evolved from a "cheap unusable shit" to very solid gear and a company that listens to their users.
If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise. That's not easy in 2025.
The entire audio/venue biz is heavily driven by mouth-to-mouth propaganda and personal networks. A friend of mine knows Uli Behringer personally - if one of his mixing console hangs itself during a concert you know who's getting a very angry call at 1:00 o'clock. If people stop losing trust in your stuff nobody will buy the rotten product (or worse entire product series) anymore.
It's the same for the video production scene. It will make you very rich if your product is very good - if it blocks a production or even worse destroys a recording you'll be beaten out of the market with fists. And the people will track your records down if you change your legal name if you are trying to back in.
The scene loves and hates with a lot of passion. And they have a memory like elephants and never forgive.
> If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise
Yeah, if the market you're talking about is "price/quality", but most musical gear doesn't sit in that market, but a wildly different one, and in that one you don't have to beat Behringer to be successful, and granted your stuff is high quality and actually innovative enough, you can almost set the price freely.
Behringer has made a bunch of old (and now very expensive) synths that the original manufactures really didn't want to make again, available to the public. At a fraction of the price. And more lately they've started to clone a bunch of studio equipment.
When I started out playing music, they were mostly just seen as cheap garbage.
Apart from the cheap plastic case their circuits actually sounded exactly the same that the stuff they cloned, but it took awhile for forum users to publicly acknowledge it.
Their customer service has been shockingly good. Helped me source a new part for a long out-of-production pedal of theirs. Went into that interaction expecting pretty much nothing, came out pleasantly surprised.
I replaced a blown Phase Linear 400 with a Behringer A800 amp for less money than the replacement output transistors would've cost. The PL400 was well setup, but the A800 sounds better to these old ears.
They've got their fair share of missteps too. Love my Behringer Neutron though, never regretted buying it at-launch despite all it's quirks. The noise on the bucket bridge delay has gotten me called some pretty nasty names on forums over the years.
I never understood the Behringer hate of the "Pro Audio" community; apparently there are many riders (requirement documents for live shows) which state "No Behringer".
I got a Behringer WING a couple of years ago, and I couldn't be happier for my home studio: Excellent connection with Midas stage boxes who have (at least for my requirements) great pre-amps, you can basically route everything, it's kind of intuitive, the possibilities are endless, it's at the same time a 32-channel USB Audio Interface which works great with Logic, I can even live-stream multi channel audio to my Mac in the other room to Logic using the DANTE card, it has easy live recording with SD cards, remote control via iPad and even 3rd party apps with APIs, etc. etc. etc. … And they just released a rack and smaller version of it, but didn't cut on the features.
As we say in Germany, maybe it's some kind of "What the farmer doesn't know, he won't eat" syndrome. From what I know and use, I am a big fan of Behringer, and especially the WING.
I use a Behringer X32 rack with a couple digital snakes to route audio between 20 or so radios, software defined receivers, online broadcasts and other audio sources, and it's one of the most powerful pieces of technology in my lab/office.
The quality however of the X32 leaves a little bit to be desired. The power supply died in it due to fault capacitors (I was able to replace them myself) and the rotary switches on the rack unit itself no longer work (I remote control the box anyway) but.. I've been able to look past all this because the sheer power of the tech is unbeatable for my use case. Running a single CAT-5 connection from my detached lab/rack to my office in the house with 32 channels of AES audio is amazing stuff for me.
Generally, businesses that try to thrive only on "take existing designs, produce them cheaper, try to out-compete on price only while not adding new R&D to the world" are businesses I try to avoid, as I feel like it'll only introduce a race to the bottom, instead of bringing new exciting stuff into the world.
This is regardless of the sector/industry, so I'll continue buying from brands that create new things, rather than from brands that iterate on existing stuff.
But with that said, it's a trite discussion, and I despise the constant "Behringer is the cheapest" or "Behringer just steals" conversations that happen every time Behringer is mentioned, more than I despise Behringer itself.
1) Behringer had a reputation for poor quality and unreliability dating back to at least I think the 90s. In my experience that’s no longer fair criticism, at least for the products I’ve owned, but the reputation persists.
2) Ethical issues. They mass produce using cheap labour in the far east (I forget exactly where). There was some controversy involving a synth/instrument sponsorship a few years ago that took an excessively long time to materialise. They are perceived to rip off other companies’ IP and undercut on price because they don’t incur the R&D costs. I seem to remember some noise/drama around one or two partnerships as well - maybe the UBxa? Again, I can’t remember.
3) They are a budget brand whereas the synth and pro audio communities are somewhat overpopulated with vocal gatekeepy snobs. I’m sure they’re probably a minority but, at least in the online world, they’re often loud and visible. You will, for example, be pretty reliably downvoted for saying anything positive about Behringer in the Reddit synth communities.
4) Uli is perceived to be a bit of an odd duck, again, by people who tend to make noise online.
For myself, I don’t love everything they’ve done business wise, but they make a good product that won’t break the bank for those on a budget. I have a couple of their TB-303 clones, which are very good (loads of companies make 303 clones, often known as acid boxes, so I don’t really see this as controversial). I also have a Poly D, which is based on the Minimoog, but has an extra oscillator, paraphony, MIDI support, and a sequencer, and I wanted a taste of that without having to drop £5k on an instrument with, by contemporary standards, very limited capabilities.
There are a bunch of synthtubers I enjoy who seem to have a good opinion of their stuff: Wine & Synths springs immediately to mind.
1) Agreed. I’ve used Behringer gear that’s perfectly fine.
2) This is my biggest issue with Behringer. They do seem very questionable in the ethics department. To add on to what you mention, they also like to apply for trademark patents for existing trademarks, not to mention trying to trademark names of their critics in some weird smear campaigns (see the KIRN corksniffer debauchle as an example) and also litigate their critics when they don’t like what they say. On the cloning side, sure, clones of extinct hardware like the TB-303 I feel is fair game, but it is always questionable when the clone is competing with a product still in production. I mean, it doesn’t matter which market it is in, whether music gear or mobile phones or whatever: clones will always be perceived as lower quality imitations and morally questionable.
3) I agree. Budget brands do not always get fair credit.
4) Yeah, that he does. It’s not necessarily fair to equate the brand with it’s director/founder, but seeing as he is quite active and the brand name is his actual last name, it is kind of unavoidable. But I mean, you should be able to be an odd duck and also be a director of a brand, as long as you behaviour isn’t hurting anyone…
> But I mean, you should be able to be an odd duck and also be a director of a brand, as long as you behaviour isn’t hurting anyone…
I think the canonical example here is the Kirn Corksniffer[1] which could have been avoided with some foresight and subsequently a quick apology, but ego can sometimes get in the way.
Behringer definitely made bad products for a very long time, and while I appreciate the increase in quality the synth recreations don't really blow my mind. They're low cost, they're hardware, but almost all of them fall short of the originals.
Behringer is a polarizing company but they revolutionized the electronic music instrument market. I have three of their synths and I'm happy with the purchases.
They brought products that, while not top quality, had decent quality for an unbeatable price. I'm not sure their gear is the best for traveling musicians, but is perfect for the home.
> They brought products that, while not top quality, had decent quality for an unbeatable price
In my mind, Behringer didn't revolutionized anything, but rather iterated their way to fame. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price, as your comment allude to.
Not to say that isn't an achievement in itself, to build same quality gear for cheap, but I'm not sure "revolutionized" is a word I'd use to describe them.
The word has been historically used to represent a new group of people being empowered. And Behringer has empowered poor and hobbyst musicians like no one else in recent memory. That's a revolution in my book.
One could make an argument that companies like Behringer, by „selling the dream“ - even if they sell it cheaper than others - are part of what makes musicians poor ;)
Cannot afford a real Jupiter-8? Now you can! And finally you will have success!
... That makes no sense. The value of an instrument isn't what makes a successful musician successful. The best musicians can make the cheapest sounding instrument sound amazing. What cheaper instruments offers is the opportunity for someone to even have a chance.
that is the point. It is easy to buy another 'toy'. It is tedious to practice using what you have. Thus many buy instrunents persuing sucess.
you need something to work with and despite great musicians sounding good on junk quality does sometimes sound better in ways you cannot compensate for. Also even if you can make cheap sound good it may be ergonomically harmful, or otherwise be a struggle. Thus it is sometimes justified to spend money on better.
Those synths are famous and expensive because they're an important part of musical culture. E.g. if you want to make dance music it's likely you want 808- or 909-style drums. You could use samples or software simulations, but I think the hardware UI makes a difference. It's easier to follow the idioms of a genre when you're working in a similar way to the originators of the genre.
> Those synths are famous and expensive because they're an important part of musical culture
Not only that, many synths are expensive at launch because of R&D and production costs (considering the small amount they produce), and impossible they're already part of "musical culture" as they just launched. TE and Elektron stuff is expensive at launch as just one counter-example.
Huh, I guess my history been different, I always understood "innovative" as something like "new and different".
Making something cheaper can be innovative, depending on how you achieved that. But if you launched a product that is the same as a competitor only because it's cheaper, because your company is funded by VCs who can continuously inject cash to bleed your competitor, I wouldn't call that "innovative" at all.
But if you instead had figured out a way to actually create the same hardware but in a cheaper way, so that's why the price is cheaper, then you did innovative in the creation process, but I still wouldn't call the finished product innovative, I'd be more focused on the process itself.
The word used in the original comment was "revolutionized" and in reference to "the market", not "innovative" and not in reference to product functionality.
> In my mind, Behringer didn't revolutionized anything, but rather iterated their way to fame. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price, as your comment allude to.
Your comment reads like "IBM didn't revolutionize anything. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price (...)"
Well, did IBM actually bring something new to the market?
As far as I know, IBM did have impressive technical innovations at first, like the Vacuum Tube Multiplier, but then at one point they stopped innovating and instead focused on basically business optimizations.
So yeah, I guess a bit similar to IBM, but that isn't the full story.
These news are of course good, but they sure bring up conflicting feelings in me. I mean, they should open source just about anything, seeing how they have unapologetically used other peoples designs as “inspiration” for their gear for decades for their own benefit. Sure, it has resulted in a lot of more affordable gear (I mean, super savings on development costs) and I really appreciate that, but it’s also at a cost. Innovators in the business get less business when there are cheaper devices “inspired” by theirs on the market, resulting in less funding for future innovations to inspire future Behringer gear. Then, of course, the whole Behringer vs Peter Kirn thing was just something that has left a permanent distaste in my mouth whenever I hear or see the name Behringer.
But I get it. Like someone commented here, the do seem like a sort of Robin Hood in the music gear world (although its not always just products from big companies that “inspire” Behringer products), making these expensive pieces of gear much more approachable for enthusiasts on a budget. Approachability is good and I love the idea of it. I just really wish it didn’t have to be at someone else's expense.
Companies like Behringer are necessary for patents to be ethically justified. The deal with patents is a temporary monopoly in exchange for greater competition once the monopoly expires. Cheap re-implementations of expired patents is the patent system working as intended.
Agreed. I have no gripe with companies reviving extinct hardware, such as multiple companies have with the TB-303 (Behringer included). Patents should even have a shorter lifespan IMO (although I admit I don’t know how long they last now). Sitting comfortably on a patent just encourages stagnation.
If it was never patented then whoever produced it clearly didn't care about preventing competition. And Behringer products all have a Behringer logo clearly printed on them, so there is no attempt to deceive anybody.
Is A2B itself completely undocumented? All I can find are AD transceiver datasheets that treat it as an opaque protocol. I like that they can tunnel I²C over it. Such a small thing that's really useful.
As someone who has been using behringer X/m32 products for nearly 2 decades now (hard to believe it's been that long!) and as someone who's done a lot of high and low end live audio work this is pretty cool. You don't often see mfgrs being so open about transport protocols or the specs are locked behind expensive paywalls and hardware to mess with them isn't remotely affordable.
I am curious how the pictured A2B board interfaces with the X/M32 board. If that's an AES50 implementation then maybe there's the possibility someone could roll up an AES50 router. That could be cool.
The X32 module interface is actually fairly simple: it's more or less just four 8-channel I2S TDM streams going in either direction. Easy peasy to interface with, nothing as complicated as AES50 involved.
AES50 itself is actually a standard; you can buy a copy of it for $50. It's basically just "Ethernet with fixed addresses and a custom frame format across two of the wire pairs, a super fast (64x the sample rate, with a -12.5% followed by a +12.5% duty cycle pulse every 2048 samples) clock signal across the other two". I've been meaning to whip up some boards that speak AES50 one of these days, just for fun.
A router would be totally possible, with of course the caveat that AES50 itself is point-to-point so you'd need some sort of out-of-band mechanism to tell the router where to send all the incoming audio streams it's receiving.
Lack of open standards also had a very negative effect on prices. A&H stageboxes are super expensive compared to others, but if you run Allen console then there is no alternative. Other than Dante I guess, but that is also expensive.
Nice to see that the parent Philippines holding company (Music Tribe) which went on a massive acquisition spree and bought a bunch of specialized audio companies still allows things to be free & open sourced.
(Though just read up that the CEO/Founder of Music Tribe is Uli Behringer)
Why would you choose XLR as a connector for an application like this? Why choose one of the most common connectors you’re likely to see in an environment where someone will be mixing audio for a completely incompatible application? Hope the devices can handle accidental 48V phantom power without damage.
The audio world has history here. A simple TSR audio jack can be used for either stereo or balanced audio, headphone or mic or (multiple) line levels, hi-Z instruments, two incompatible MIDI (digital) connectors, multiple incompatible foot controller connectors, etc.
The options for connectors that are robust enough for stage work is limited and the alternatives tend to be expensive since they are no where near as ubiquitous. 1/4" Phono plug and XLR have proven themselves and only take a couple minutes to replace when an accident happens. So we use XLR and Phono everywhere for audio. The real question is why fragile barrel connectors in three different sizes and no wiring standard for power? And now we have just as fragile USB in three different sizes, but at least the wiring is standard. You can't power up but you can still plug it into the board!
It is rare you see anything in the audio world with an XLR that can not survive an accidental encounter with phantom power. People are paranoid about it but for some reason have no issue with phono being use for speaker connects which is far more likely to kill gear. I used to repair audio gear, every bit of gear I encountered that got fried by phantom power had an XLR to TRS in the mix.
XLR with Neutrik Plugs + high quality cables is crazy robust.
You can tow a car with it and then use it to work a festival with Tier 1 bands afterwards without any problems. Most likely it will work even better than before.
Also differential signal nature by design is the standard - It's like CAN. This kills 99% of non-wanted signals coming from the wire physically.
It's already common to put digital data over XLR in stage environments, like DMX lighting and AES3. Also venues will have an XLR snake but definitely not a TRS jack snake from stage to mixer.
That’s my point - reusing an existing connector type for a new and completely incompatible role will not make life easier.
I joked to a friend once that it would be far better if we just used a single connector type for everything in audio and get rid of jacks, XLR, power connectors, MIDI, etc. They liked the idea - I deadpan suggested regular mains plugs and sockets would be good - cheap, ubiquitous and sturdy.
That's fair point - I can imagine someone plugging a digital out into analog in, not expecting the hell that's about to break. Probably it sounds like digital noise, not sure about levels.
But the advantage of reusing cabling that already exists in 100% of the venues, stages and churches cannot be overstated. It is literally a drop-in upgrade, boom, now a single cable carries 32 channels instead of 1.
> reusing an existing connector type for a new and completely incompatible role will not make life easier
I don't think it's completely new purpose for XLR, I'm fairly sure I've seen other stuff than audio being pulled through XLR more than once even in professional environments.
I was a lighting designer for several years and in that time in don't think I ever saw a proper 5-pin DMX512 connector. Even in venues with millions in house lights, the connection backstage to the house was XLR.
Yes, I only saw 3-pin XLR for DMX512, while being aware of 5-pin XLR as "correct". Everything from the lighting console, to dimmer packs and moving heads, to the aforementioned connection to house lights. This was 2009-2013. Maybe it was regional?
Technically DMX needs 110 ohm cable - the connector is less relevant. But most DMX devices are forgiving, and will accept whatever rubbish cable you throw its way.
Because it is everywhere and very robust. And phantom power is called "phantom" for a reason. It does not harm the most devices, if they do not support it, because the voltage just cannot apply, except on some rare old devices.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, that is largely what Behringer is known for, affordable clones of more expensive gear. It's not everything they do, but it's a decent chunk of it. I'm glad they produce audio gear for the masses.
That is one way to look at them. The other is more akin to a parasite, wait for small companies to invest and innovate and once a product is proven in the marketplace, copy it.
I don't really want to judge them, cheap music gear is certainly good for consumers but talking to small manufacturers over many years I've yet to meet anyone who likes them.
If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
Many of those instruments are based on 40 to 50 year old designs. They've released products that were simply not in the market anymore, or second-hand at exorbitant prices. That's not parasitic. Their production processes might not stand up to scrutiny, though.
> If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
That's the problem with all open source. If you open source something good, someone else is going to run with it.
Well, they’re also known for cloning newer devices, such as (which I didn’t realize until recently) the Korg Volca line, which were already rather cheap devices to begin with. I admit that I don’t know the exact details on those devices from Behringer apart from small snippets I’ve seen popping up in videos and perhaps they’re adding something new to it, but they sure seem very similar to the Volca designs.
Other digital Audio connection protocols: Toslink, AES50, AES67 (Ravenna), Dante, AVB, AES10 (MADI). Then for stage connection basically every mixer manufacture has their own protocol with Allen Heaths SLink, Soundcraft’s Ultranet/SI Link, Yamaha’s TWINLANe and YGDAI, Roland’s REAC, Avid’s AVB-based Stage 64, and DiGiCo’s Optocore/SD-Rack links...
Most of them use standard CAT cables for this since that is what has been made for the transmission of network data for reasonably long distances. You can replace the RJ-45 plugs with Ethercon connectors if you need it extra rugged and reliable.
Ravenna, AVB and MADI are already existing, open standards that do even more, but I guess they are too expensive because of the ultra low latency requirements and FPGAs involved.
The use of an specialized automotive audio bus IC is interesting and probably gets the cost down, but within a car cable lengths are rarely comparable to what would happen in a concert venue. According to Behringer there is a 15m max cable distance per spec. That is.. too low for practise. Maybe for a small rehearsal room or so, but if you go from a front of house mixer to the stage 15m is nothing, especially if you can't run it the direct way.
AES67 is the open standard, ravenna and dante are extensions/alterations of it (well dante preceded aes67 but can be run in aes67 compatibility) and none of them require FPGAs, they usually use FPGAs to keep latency very low but they work just fine with any network card that supports PTPv2 and in dante case it’s not even that strict.
Go grab the ravenna docs, it’s pretty close to the spec for AES67 with added details for how to communicate metadata. You will find it, SMPTE2110 and the likes is all built on-top of existing standards (RTP, PTP, amongst others), even AVB which has much stricter requirements regarding latency is the same. These aren’t complex proprietary standards, they are standards which just specifies restrictions and interactions between other standards.
What I’m getting at is the Klark Teknik and Behringer after then refusing to use these standards as their interconnect is the industry outlier, the only other example in this discussion which still has relevance is Allen and Heath and they now do actually support Dante stage boxes on their models.
Twinlan and the other examples were never the only options, Digico and soundcraft support madi by default, Yamaha effectively spurred dante into existence in the live industry. Their proprietary protocol are there to solve problems that cannot be solved with the standard interconnect, usually latency or channel count or both.
StageConnect is a connection to transmit 32 uncompressed audio-channels via a single XLR cable. StageConnect is based on A2B, the Automotive Audio Bus (A2B).
How is the latency? How far can a cable go without some kind of repeater?
Behringer has been fairly consumer friendly over the years, it's much appreciated- its something I consider when buying audio stuff.
Behringer evolved from a "cheap unusable shit" to very solid gear and a company that listens to their users.
If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise. That's not easy in 2025.
The entire audio/venue biz is heavily driven by mouth-to-mouth propaganda and personal networks. A friend of mine knows Uli Behringer personally - if one of his mixing console hangs itself during a concert you know who's getting a very angry call at 1:00 o'clock. If people stop losing trust in your stuff nobody will buy the rotten product (or worse entire product series) anymore.
It's the same for the video production scene. It will make you very rich if your product is very good - if it blocks a production or even worse destroys a recording you'll be beaten out of the market with fists. And the people will track your records down if you change your legal name if you are trying to back in.
The scene loves and hates with a lot of passion. And they have a memory like elephants and never forgive.
> If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise
Yeah, if the market you're talking about is "price/quality", but most musical gear doesn't sit in that market, but a wildly different one, and in that one you don't have to beat Behringer to be successful, and granted your stuff is high quality and actually innovative enough, you can almost set the price freely.
I don't understand. What is the "wildly different" market that "most musical gear" is in? Do you have a citation for "most musical gear?"
Behringer has made a bunch of old (and now very expensive) synths that the original manufactures really didn't want to make again, available to the public. At a fraction of the price. And more lately they've started to clone a bunch of studio equipment.
When I started out playing music, they were mostly just seen as cheap garbage.
Apart from the cheap plastic case their circuits actually sounded exactly the same that the stuff they cloned, but it took awhile for forum users to publicly acknowledge it.
Their customer service has been shockingly good. Helped me source a new part for a long out-of-production pedal of theirs. Went into that interaction expecting pretty much nothing, came out pleasantly surprised.
You can use real or perceived quality to build loyalty to your brand. You can protect this with innovation, or value, or a closed ecosystem.
Behringer’s moat is value, not a closed ecosystem. If their stuff becomes a standard, it’s all upside.
I replaced a blown Phase Linear 400 with a Behringer A800 amp for less money than the replacement output transistors would've cost. The PL400 was well setup, but the A800 sounds better to these old ears.
They've got their fair share of missteps too. Love my Behringer Neutron though, never regretted buying it at-launch despite all it's quirks. The noise on the bucket bridge delay has gotten me called some pretty nasty names on forums over the years.
I never understood the Behringer hate of the "Pro Audio" community; apparently there are many riders (requirement documents for live shows) which state "No Behringer".
I got a Behringer WING a couple of years ago, and I couldn't be happier for my home studio: Excellent connection with Midas stage boxes who have (at least for my requirements) great pre-amps, you can basically route everything, it's kind of intuitive, the possibilities are endless, it's at the same time a 32-channel USB Audio Interface which works great with Logic, I can even live-stream multi channel audio to my Mac in the other room to Logic using the DANTE card, it has easy live recording with SD cards, remote control via iPad and even 3rd party apps with APIs, etc. etc. etc. … And they just released a rack and smaller version of it, but didn't cut on the features.
As we say in Germany, maybe it's some kind of "What the farmer doesn't know, he won't eat" syndrome. From what I know and use, I am a big fan of Behringer, and especially the WING.
I use a Behringer X32 rack with a couple digital snakes to route audio between 20 or so radios, software defined receivers, online broadcasts and other audio sources, and it's one of the most powerful pieces of technology in my lab/office.
The quality however of the X32 leaves a little bit to be desired. The power supply died in it due to fault capacitors (I was able to replace them myself) and the rotary switches on the rack unit itself no longer work (I remote control the box anyway) but.. I've been able to look past all this because the sheer power of the tech is unbeatable for my use case. Running a single CAT-5 connection from my detached lab/rack to my office in the house with 32 channels of AES audio is amazing stuff for me.
Generally, businesses that try to thrive only on "take existing designs, produce them cheaper, try to out-compete on price only while not adding new R&D to the world" are businesses I try to avoid, as I feel like it'll only introduce a race to the bottom, instead of bringing new exciting stuff into the world.
This is regardless of the sector/industry, so I'll continue buying from brands that create new things, rather than from brands that iterate on existing stuff.
But with that said, it's a trite discussion, and I despise the constant "Behringer is the cheapest" or "Behringer just steals" conversations that happen every time Behringer is mentioned, more than I despise Behringer itself.
Behringer earned a reputation for poor quality in their early days. things are muth better now but quality control still isn't the best.
A few things:
1) Behringer had a reputation for poor quality and unreliability dating back to at least I think the 90s. In my experience that’s no longer fair criticism, at least for the products I’ve owned, but the reputation persists.
2) Ethical issues. They mass produce using cheap labour in the far east (I forget exactly where). There was some controversy involving a synth/instrument sponsorship a few years ago that took an excessively long time to materialise. They are perceived to rip off other companies’ IP and undercut on price because they don’t incur the R&D costs. I seem to remember some noise/drama around one or two partnerships as well - maybe the UBxa? Again, I can’t remember.
3) They are a budget brand whereas the synth and pro audio communities are somewhat overpopulated with vocal gatekeepy snobs. I’m sure they’re probably a minority but, at least in the online world, they’re often loud and visible. You will, for example, be pretty reliably downvoted for saying anything positive about Behringer in the Reddit synth communities.
4) Uli is perceived to be a bit of an odd duck, again, by people who tend to make noise online.
For myself, I don’t love everything they’ve done business wise, but they make a good product that won’t break the bank for those on a budget. I have a couple of their TB-303 clones, which are very good (loads of companies make 303 clones, often known as acid boxes, so I don’t really see this as controversial). I also have a Poly D, which is based on the Minimoog, but has an extra oscillator, paraphony, MIDI support, and a sequencer, and I wanted a taste of that without having to drop £5k on an instrument with, by contemporary standards, very limited capabilities.
There are a bunch of synthtubers I enjoy who seem to have a good opinion of their stuff: Wine & Synths springs immediately to mind.
1) Agreed. I’ve used Behringer gear that’s perfectly fine.
2) This is my biggest issue with Behringer. They do seem very questionable in the ethics department. To add on to what you mention, they also like to apply for trademark patents for existing trademarks, not to mention trying to trademark names of their critics in some weird smear campaigns (see the KIRN corksniffer debauchle as an example) and also litigate their critics when they don’t like what they say. On the cloning side, sure, clones of extinct hardware like the TB-303 I feel is fair game, but it is always questionable when the clone is competing with a product still in production. I mean, it doesn’t matter which market it is in, whether music gear or mobile phones or whatever: clones will always be perceived as lower quality imitations and morally questionable.
3) I agree. Budget brands do not always get fair credit.
4) Yeah, that he does. It’s not necessarily fair to equate the brand with it’s director/founder, but seeing as he is quite active and the brand name is his actual last name, it is kind of unavoidable. But I mean, you should be able to be an odd duck and also be a director of a brand, as long as you behaviour isn’t hurting anyone…
> But I mean, you should be able to be an odd duck and also be a director of a brand, as long as you behaviour isn’t hurting anyone…
I think the canonical example here is the Kirn Corksniffer[1] which could have been avoided with some foresight and subsequently a quick apology, but ego can sometimes get in the way.
Behringer definitely made bad products for a very long time, and while I appreciate the increase in quality the synth recreations don't really blow my mind. They're low cost, they're hardware, but almost all of them fall short of the originals.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/a-major-synth-company-create...?
Behringer is a polarizing company but they revolutionized the electronic music instrument market. I have three of their synths and I'm happy with the purchases.
They brought products that, while not top quality, had decent quality for an unbeatable price. I'm not sure their gear is the best for traveling musicians, but is perfect for the home.
> They brought products that, while not top quality, had decent quality for an unbeatable price
In my mind, Behringer didn't revolutionized anything, but rather iterated their way to fame. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price, as your comment allude to.
Not to say that isn't an achievement in itself, to build same quality gear for cheap, but I'm not sure "revolutionized" is a word I'd use to describe them.
The word has been historically used to represent a new group of people being empowered. And Behringer has empowered poor and hobbyst musicians like no one else in recent memory. That's a revolution in my book.
One could make an argument that companies like Behringer, by „selling the dream“ - even if they sell it cheaper than others - are part of what makes musicians poor ;)
Cannot afford a real Jupiter-8? Now you can! And finally you will have success!
(Narrator: They did not succeed)
... That makes no sense. The value of an instrument isn't what makes a successful musician successful. The best musicians can make the cheapest sounding instrument sound amazing. What cheaper instruments offers is the opportunity for someone to even have a chance.
that is the point. It is easy to buy another 'toy'. It is tedious to practice using what you have. Thus many buy instrunents persuing sucess.
you need something to work with and despite great musicians sounding good on junk quality does sometimes sound better in ways you cannot compensate for. Also even if you can make cheap sound good it may be ergonomically harmful, or otherwise be a struggle. Thus it is sometimes justified to spend money on better.
But Behringer is mostly selling clones of famous (and expensive) synths.
You don’t need these expensive synths.
But md point is that you wouldn’t even need the clones of Behringer.
Those synths are famous and expensive because they're an important part of musical culture. E.g. if you want to make dance music it's likely you want 808- or 909-style drums. You could use samples or software simulations, but I think the hardware UI makes a difference. It's easier to follow the idioms of a genre when you're working in a similar way to the originators of the genre.
> Those synths are famous and expensive because they're an important part of musical culture
Not only that, many synths are expensive at launch because of R&D and production costs (considering the small amount they produce), and impossible they're already part of "musical culture" as they just launched. TE and Elektron stuff is expensive at launch as just one counter-example.
Huh, I guess my history been different, I always understood "innovative" as something like "new and different".
Making something cheaper can be innovative, depending on how you achieved that. But if you launched a product that is the same as a competitor only because it's cheaper, because your company is funded by VCs who can continuously inject cash to bleed your competitor, I wouldn't call that "innovative" at all.
But if you instead had figured out a way to actually create the same hardware but in a cheaper way, so that's why the price is cheaper, then you did innovative in the creation process, but I still wouldn't call the finished product innovative, I'd be more focused on the process itself.
One of you is talking about a technical revolution, that changes what things are or how things are made.
The other is talking about market revolution, where market dynamics change, typically by lowering the price.
Yeah, I think that's a fair characterization.
The word used in the original comment was "revolutionized" and in reference to "the market", not "innovative" and not in reference to product functionality.
> In my mind, Behringer didn't revolutionized anything, but rather iterated their way to fame. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price, as your comment allude to.
Your comment reads like "IBM didn't revolutionize anything. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price (...)"
Well, did IBM actually bring something new to the market?
As far as I know, IBM did have impressive technical innovations at first, like the Vacuum Tube Multiplier, but then at one point they stopped innovating and instead focused on basically business optimizations.
So yeah, I guess a bit similar to IBM, but that isn't the full story.
These news are of course good, but they sure bring up conflicting feelings in me. I mean, they should open source just about anything, seeing how they have unapologetically used other peoples designs as “inspiration” for their gear for decades for their own benefit. Sure, it has resulted in a lot of more affordable gear (I mean, super savings on development costs) and I really appreciate that, but it’s also at a cost. Innovators in the business get less business when there are cheaper devices “inspired” by theirs on the market, resulting in less funding for future innovations to inspire future Behringer gear. Then, of course, the whole Behringer vs Peter Kirn thing was just something that has left a permanent distaste in my mouth whenever I hear or see the name Behringer.
But I get it. Like someone commented here, the do seem like a sort of Robin Hood in the music gear world (although its not always just products from big companies that “inspire” Behringer products), making these expensive pieces of gear much more approachable for enthusiasts on a budget. Approachability is good and I love the idea of it. I just really wish it didn’t have to be at someone else's expense.
Companies like Behringer are necessary for patents to be ethically justified. The deal with patents is a temporary monopoly in exchange for greater competition once the monopoly expires. Cheap re-implementations of expired patents is the patent system working as intended.
Agreed. I have no gripe with companies reviving extinct hardware, such as multiple companies have with the TB-303 (Behringer included). Patents should even have a shorter lifespan IMO (although I admit I don’t know how long they last now). Sitting comfortably on a patent just encourages stagnation.
The product designs Behringer are often accused of plagiarizing are generally not patented.
If it was never patented then whoever produced it clearly didn't care about preventing competition. And Behringer products all have a Behringer logo clearly printed on them, so there is no attempt to deceive anybody.
A lot of products have new ideas to them which are not patentable.
Is A2B itself completely undocumented? All I can find are AD transceiver datasheets that treat it as an opaque protocol. I like that they can tunnel I²C over it. Such a small thing that's really useful.
As someone who has been using behringer X/m32 products for nearly 2 decades now (hard to believe it's been that long!) and as someone who's done a lot of high and low end live audio work this is pretty cool. You don't often see mfgrs being so open about transport protocols or the specs are locked behind expensive paywalls and hardware to mess with them isn't remotely affordable.
I am curious how the pictured A2B board interfaces with the X/M32 board. If that's an AES50 implementation then maybe there's the possibility someone could roll up an AES50 router. That could be cool.
Card-carrying AES member here.
The X32 module interface is actually fairly simple: it's more or less just four 8-channel I2S TDM streams going in either direction. Easy peasy to interface with, nothing as complicated as AES50 involved.
AES50 itself is actually a standard; you can buy a copy of it for $50. It's basically just "Ethernet with fixed addresses and a custom frame format across two of the wire pairs, a super fast (64x the sample rate, with a -12.5% followed by a +12.5% duty cycle pulse every 2048 samples) clock signal across the other two". I've been meaning to whip up some boards that speak AES50 one of these days, just for fun.
A router would be totally possible, with of course the caveat that AES50 itself is point-to-point so you'd need some sort of out-of-band mechanism to tell the router where to send all the incoming audio streams it's receiving.
Lack of open standards also had a very negative effect on prices. A&H stageboxes are super expensive compared to others, but if you run Allen console then there is no alternative. Other than Dante I guess, but that is also expensive.
Nice to see that the parent Philippines holding company (Music Tribe) which went on a massive acquisition spree and bought a bunch of specialized audio companies still allows things to be free & open sourced.
(Though just read up that the CEO/Founder of Music Tribe is Uli Behringer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Tribe
Once your company is big enough you have a lot of potential open doors to optimize your company structure. Everyone does this.
Why would you choose XLR as a connector for an application like this? Why choose one of the most common connectors you’re likely to see in an environment where someone will be mixing audio for a completely incompatible application? Hope the devices can handle accidental 48V phantom power without damage.
The audio world has history here. A simple TSR audio jack can be used for either stereo or balanced audio, headphone or mic or (multiple) line levels, hi-Z instruments, two incompatible MIDI (digital) connectors, multiple incompatible foot controller connectors, etc.
The options for connectors that are robust enough for stage work is limited and the alternatives tend to be expensive since they are no where near as ubiquitous. 1/4" Phono plug and XLR have proven themselves and only take a couple minutes to replace when an accident happens. So we use XLR and Phono everywhere for audio. The real question is why fragile barrel connectors in three different sizes and no wiring standard for power? And now we have just as fragile USB in three different sizes, but at least the wiring is standard. You can't power up but you can still plug it into the board!
It is rare you see anything in the audio world with an XLR that can not survive an accidental encounter with phantom power. People are paranoid about it but for some reason have no issue with phono being use for speaker connects which is far more likely to kill gear. I used to repair audio gear, every bit of gear I encountered that got fried by phantom power had an XLR to TRS in the mix.
XLR with Neutrik Plugs + high quality cables is crazy robust.
You can tow a car with it and then use it to work a festival with Tier 1 bands afterwards without any problems. Most likely it will work even better than before.
Also differential signal nature by design is the standard - It's like CAN. This kills 99% of non-wanted signals coming from the wire physically.
It's already common to put digital data over XLR in stage environments, like DMX lighting and AES3. Also venues will have an XLR snake but definitely not a TRS jack snake from stage to mixer.
XLRs are everywhere and already installed. You could choose cat5 but it's not as common.
That’s my point - reusing an existing connector type for a new and completely incompatible role will not make life easier.
I joked to a friend once that it would be far better if we just used a single connector type for everything in audio and get rid of jacks, XLR, power connectors, MIDI, etc. They liked the idea - I deadpan suggested regular mains plugs and sockets would be good - cheap, ubiquitous and sturdy.
That's fair point - I can imagine someone plugging a digital out into analog in, not expecting the hell that's about to break. Probably it sounds like digital noise, not sure about levels.
But the advantage of reusing cabling that already exists in 100% of the venues, stages and churches cannot be overstated. It is literally a drop-in upgrade, boom, now a single cable carries 32 channels instead of 1.
> reusing an existing connector type for a new and completely incompatible role will not make life easier
I don't think it's completely new purpose for XLR, I'm fairly sure I've seen other stuff than audio being pulled through XLR more than once even in professional environments.
Exactly - AES/EBU over XLR has been a thing in the broadcast world for ages. The Behringer WING mixer even has a pair of AES/EBU ports on the back.
I've seen XLR used for DMX lighting. The advice for stage techs seems to be "don't do that". Same thing applies to this standard probably.
I was a lighting designer for several years and in that time in don't think I ever saw a proper 5-pin DMX512 connector. Even in venues with millions in house lights, the connection backstage to the house was XLR.
The proper DMX512 connector is XLR, though? The 5-pin variant, that is.
I worked as a tech at a stage for a short while. We always used XLR5 for lighting and XLR3 for audio.
Yes, I only saw 3-pin XLR for DMX512, while being aware of 5-pin XLR as "correct". Everything from the lighting console, to dimmer packs and moving heads, to the aforementioned connection to house lights. This was 2009-2013. Maybe it was regional?
It's the same thing as USB-C, actually. The connector looks the same, but the cable can vary a lot. At least audio cables are labelled.
Technically DMX needs 110 ohm cable - the connector is less relevant. But most DMX devices are forgiving, and will accept whatever rubbish cable you throw its way.
XLR is balanced, meaning you can transport a voltage accurately over a longer distance.
There is a mirror voltage on a second line that is mirrored and summed with the first again at the receiving end.
All noise picked up underway will affect both lines fairly equally, so the reversed line has the same noise as the normal line.
The noise will be inverted and summed with the regular noise, theoretically nullifying it completely.
Because it is everywhere and very robust. And phantom power is called "phantom" for a reason. It does not harm the most devices, if they do not support it, because the voltage just cannot apply, except on some rare old devices.
Behringer will always hold a special place in my heart.
I'll buy behringer products until i can justify my ROI's on the more expensive (better sounding) gear.
Behringer is the Robin Hood of the audio industry - they steal ideas from the expensive companies and remake them cheaply for the poor.
I don't know why you're being downvoted, that is largely what Behringer is known for, affordable clones of more expensive gear. It's not everything they do, but it's a decent chunk of it. I'm glad they produce audio gear for the masses.
That is one way to look at them. The other is more akin to a parasite, wait for small companies to invest and innovate and once a product is proven in the marketplace, copy it. I don't really want to judge them, cheap music gear is certainly good for consumers but talking to small manufacturers over many years I've yet to meet anyone who likes them. If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
Many of those instruments are based on 40 to 50 year old designs. They've released products that were simply not in the market anymore, or second-hand at exorbitant prices. That's not parasitic. Their production processes might not stand up to scrutiny, though.
> If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
That's the problem with all open source. If you open source something good, someone else is going to run with it.
Well, they’re also known for cloning newer devices, such as (which I didn’t realize until recently) the Korg Volca line, which were already rather cheap devices to begin with. I admit that I don’t know the exact details on those devices from Behringer apart from small snippets I’ve seen popping up in videos and perhaps they’re adding something new to it, but they sure seem very similar to the Volca designs.
Other digital Audio connection protocols: Toslink, AES50, AES67 (Ravenna), Dante, AVB, AES10 (MADI). Then for stage connection basically every mixer manufacture has their own protocol with Allen Heaths SLink, Soundcraft’s Ultranet/SI Link, Yamaha’s TWINLANe and YGDAI, Roland’s REAC, Avid’s AVB-based Stage 64, and DiGiCo’s Optocore/SD-Rack links...
Most of them use standard CAT cables for this since that is what has been made for the transmission of network data for reasonably long distances. You can replace the RJ-45 plugs with Ethercon connectors if you need it extra rugged and reliable.
Ravenna, AVB and MADI are already existing, open standards that do even more, but I guess they are too expensive because of the ultra low latency requirements and FPGAs involved.
The use of an specialized automotive audio bus IC is interesting and probably gets the cost down, but within a car cable lengths are rarely comparable to what would happen in a concert venue. According to Behringer there is a 15m max cable distance per spec. That is.. too low for practise. Maybe for a small rehearsal room or so, but if you go from a front of house mixer to the stage 15m is nothing, especially if you can't run it the direct way.
Nice of them opening it up still.
AES67 is the open standard, ravenna and dante are extensions/alterations of it (well dante preceded aes67 but can be run in aes67 compatibility) and none of them require FPGAs, they usually use FPGAs to keep latency very low but they work just fine with any network card that supports PTPv2 and in dante case it’s not even that strict.
Go grab the ravenna docs, it’s pretty close to the spec for AES67 with added details for how to communicate metadata. You will find it, SMPTE2110 and the likes is all built on-top of existing standards (RTP, PTP, amongst others), even AVB which has much stricter requirements regarding latency is the same. These aren’t complex proprietary standards, they are standards which just specifies restrictions and interactions between other standards.
What I’m getting at is the Klark Teknik and Behringer after then refusing to use these standards as their interconnect is the industry outlier, the only other example in this discussion which still has relevance is Allen and Heath and they now do actually support Dante stage boxes on their models.
Twinlan and the other examples were never the only options, Digico and soundcraft support madi by default, Yamaha effectively spurred dante into existence in the live industry. Their proprietary protocol are there to solve problems that cannot be solved with the standard interconnect, usually latency or channel count or both.
Most likely automotive stuff is specified with huge safety margins.
Total cable length is 40m, 15m between nodes. Maybe in a non-car environment these can be stretched, because the needed noise margins are lower?
https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...
Are there patents that need to be licensed to use this?
No, it uses a first party Analog Devices IC AD2428 which has the patent licence - A2B was meant to simplify and reduce cost in automative audio https://www.analog.com/en/resources/technical-articles/innov...