Behind the scenes at Behringer

Great information about Behringer's production line


Thanks

I was glad to see this too. I think some of their products are too similarly marketed to their competitors (Onyx vs Xenyx), but the Behringer products I've used have been really good. I've got a compressor that has traveled with me for at least 10 years that's still going strong, and I've used two of their live mixers with really good results, one especially got alot of on the road use and I never had any trouble from it.

Donny

ORIGINAL: Lanceindastudio

Nice! Good stuff! I am never afraid to buy their products like many are. Now I feel even better.

Very interesting diary. I liked the documentary-style delivery. Like him, I also thought of Uli Behringer as an enigmatic figure, and I wondered if he truly existed.


Now I realize that he is the antichrist.


( j/k... did I get ya?)

I also want to applaud you, cryo, on this web magazine. It looks like a real find.

Looks like they are moving in the right direction.

It seems like they are working on quality control, which is good.


edit* Just noticed there's 15 minutes difference between posting and editing times...weird

behringer uses the exact same circuit board and semiconductor configurations as the other "big-name" competitors do. they're basically an even keel knock-off brand. the only place they skimp is on the pots, pans and connectors. besides, all their products are built under the iso 9000 standards. there really is no reason to buy a yamaha mixer over a behringer in most cases. in fact - i've usually gotten better performance out of the latter.

ORIGINAL: Rbh

I believe there were some issues of direct reverse engineering Mackie analogue boards about 5-6 years ago. I swore that I would never purchase from them for that reason alone. So far I haven't... too bad because they're bang for the buck is tremendous.

If you think that then I would suggest to start buying their stuff

Hmm. I'll be damned. Could another company come along and scoop out Behringer on production costs, to the point where retail prices are trivial and no one cares about the cost of anything because it's all so cheap? Will a week's salary ever fill an entire recording studio with computers, monitors, instruments, microphones, etc.?

Behringer... $40 microphones... What the hell is happening to this place? What's next, "I found this great deal on a preamp at Rdio Shack!" I'm not a gear snob, but crimeny! This joint's turning into bottom-feeders junction.

ORIGINAL: j boy

Behringer... $40 microphones... What the hell is happening to this place? What's next, "I found this great deal on a preamp at Rdio Shack!" I'm not a gear snob, but crimeny! This joint's turning into bottom-feeders junction.

I hope this is a joke.

Any gear snob who is recording on a computer is like someone who drives a Hyundai looking down their nose at someone who drives a Neon.

To expand a little bit, what ultimately has been the driver for low-cost gear is digital recording. The explosion of Mackie went hand-in-glove with the arrival of the ADAT (see Fletcher's 1996 infamous AES scuplture, whose title is not reprintable here). The ADAT suddenly put high-quality recording into the realm of affordability for vast numbers of people who previously had the choice between a cassette portastudio or a very expensive reel-to-reel/mixing console setup. This led to a market for good-quality mixers, preamps, and so on that would previously have been pointless for home recordists bouncing tracks on crappy cassette tapes.

A mere 15 years ago or so (think about that), a state-of-the-art budget studio was a couple of ADATs and maybe a 24-channel mixer by the likes of Mackie, Tascam, or Yamaha. These things didn't even pretend to be "transparent" or "world-class." It was staggering that they were merely adequate. And you could buy a new car for the price of that rig, before you added any effects, cables, mics, stands, or monitors. Fortunately the preposterously successful Yamaha NS10 was readily available at retail, and a couple of new-fangled digital reverbs from the likes of Alesis could be got for a few hundred apiece, with similar money for some dbx compressors.

In short, you could open a recording studio for about the cost of opening a restaurant instead of a film studio, and you could produce "pro" sound quality from it. This was a revolution.

One of the great ironies was that back in the early days of the digital revolution, you could often pick up vintage tube mics and primo premaps, mixing consoles and the like for a song, as radio stations and college studios and the like switched over to more reliable and modern gear. Now, the affluent hobbyists and collectors have driven the prices for such stuff through the roof.

As the ADAT drove the demand for Mackie, so the computer has driven Behringer and MXL. Practically everyone already owns a computer, and for a few hundred (now for a few dozen) dollars, we can get a whole recording-studio-in-a-box, complete with mixer and effects. When an ADAT cost 3 grand (in 1995 money), spending a couple hundred on a compressor or whatever was incidental. But when the whole shebang costs next to nothing, a market is opened for class A preamps that cost $50 or whatever.

Cheers.

From 1984 until 2001 I worked as a manufacturing engineer for a very well-known Chicago-based consumer electronics company. Their claim to fame was televisions but they dabbled in pretty much everything from stereos to computers to cable & satellite set top convertors (which was the division I worked for). I was responsible for helping to setup a couple of large manufacturing plants in Mexico (at a time when US manufacturing jobs were heading across the border to Mexico). In a strange ironic twist, I was helping to put myself out of business but hey, it was a paycheck. Eventually I found another position within the same company and rode that train for a good long while.

Watching that Behringer-China video brought back a lot of memories. What Behringer (and a lot of other companies) are doing now in China, we (and a lot of other companies) were doing 20 years ago in Mexico. The country of origin might have changed but it's exactly the same stuff, the same production lines, the same SMD pick & place machines, the same ATE equipment, reflow soldering ovens, solder paste stencil machines, manual labor, etc. There's nothing new or innovative about any of that. There is only one reason for any company to be doing business in China: low-cost labor. You could make an argument that China is a huge country and there is a lot of market to explore there but consider that they are probably making a dollar an hour (or less) and can't even afford the products that they make. It was the same way in Mexico initially. Eventually the Mexicans wised up when they realized we were making a whole lot more money than they were (which probably explains our current illegal alien problem these days). I remember a specific visit to one of our plants in Chihuahua, Mexico when there was a workers strike for more pay. I was standing across the street from the plant when this all took place. We were unable to get into the building because they had locked all the entrances to the plant. Eventually this strike turned into a free-for-all with people throwing rocks and hitting each other with sticks. We split when the fun started because we were sitting ducks.

Initially, the cost of hotels, restaurants, stores, clubs, drinks, etc. there in Mexico was ridiculously cheap. But over time, the more gringos that moved down there to work, the more money they spent and the more the price of things went up to the point that the cost of things eventually reached parity. Mexico wasn't such as a great place to do business anymore because it cost too much.

The same thing will happen in China at which point everyone will have to find a new 3rd world cesspool country to do business in. You know, anywhere you build electronic devices there is going to be hazardous waste. It gets dumped. That's all there is to it. You can't wish that stuff away. We had the same problem in Mexico. What to do with the waste materials.

Almost all the gringos that spent any amount of time down there ended up marrying Mexican women. If they were already married they got divorced. I don't even have to ask. I know that is going on in China too. True story: the first time I walked into a Mexican production facility I noticed all these young women sitting on the production lines. Imagine a production line 100' long with nothing but young women as far as the eye can see. I was being escorted down one of the lines and I started to hear whistling and giggling. At first I wasn't sure what was going on but as I looked around I noticed the girls were all whistling at me. I'm sure my face turned bright red which only made them giggle more. It was explained to me later on that this was a mating call. These girls were all trying to get noticed and find a husband. Everyone who came to the plant got the same greeting. I enjoyed watching the looks on the new guys' faces when they'd walk down the line.

The reason why it was mostly women on the production lines is because it was determined that women had a higher threshold of pain - they could tolerate the endless hours of mind-numbing assembly work better than their male counterparts. Fridays were the best because all the women would come to work dressed to kill. At the end of the day they would get their pay and hit the discos in town.

One last tidbit - you didn't want to use the same washroom as the production workers - ever. There were no stalls or doors on any of the toliets. They were just out there in the open. The first time I walked into one of the bathrooms in the plant I was greeted by a bunch of guys sitting there doing their "thang" staring at me like "yeah sure man - come over here - here's a toilet next to me that's available". Us gringos would always have to walk to the front of the plant and use one of the executive washrooms.

PS - a few years ago I was working a temp job (when the studio business was too slow to even pay the rent). I was working for a local company that was in the process of moving production to... ta da... China. They had brought over a bunch of Chinese workers (mostly women from what I could tell) to learn the ropes and go back home to teach everyone else. I have to tell ya, these were some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen. They were like life-size Barbie dolls. Drop dead gorgeous. I have no doubt in my mind that there is a lot of cross-cultural relationships going on. (sorry hope I'm not insulting anyone)

The same thing will happen in China at which point everyone will have to find a new 3rd world cesspool country to do business in.

What's the new frontier in manufacturing jobs? Africa? South America?

ORIGINAL: Jessie Sammler

The same thing will happen in China at which point everyone will have to find a new 3rd world cesspool country to do business in.

What's the new frontier in manufacturing jobs? Africa? South America?

Who knows but rest assured, wherever there is an abundant source of cheap labor that includes mostly young single women and plenty of space to dump our toxic waste, we're working on it

ORIGINAL: j boy
...What you charitably call "reverse engineering" I would call blatant copying and manufacturing under near slave conditions....

For the record, I have no objection to the term "blatant copying," and offer no defense of Behringer, or of Chinese manufacturing. But I do offer for consideration two points:

- If Behringer is "slave conditions," then so is virtually every consumer good available for purchase in the US. Did you watch the video of their factory? It's a lot less offensive than some of the sweatshops in the NY garment district that proudly affix "made in the USA" to their goods. If you refuse to buy products made by people who are not paid a wage sufficient to support a family, I salute you for sticking to a tough principle, but to single out Behringer is preposterous. You'd have to include Ford, GE, Sony, Yamaha, Fender, General Mills, Fruit of the Loom, Mercedes-Benz, pretty much every retail consumer good.

- Behringer certainly engages in blatant copying, but what audio manufacturer doesn't? Perhaps Rupert Neve Designs gets a pass since he is primarily ripping off his own ideas from a prior company, but essentially every non-boutique manufacturer and the majority of boutique ones issue blatant knockoffs. If Behringer does it to a greater degree, it is a quantitative difference, not a qualititative one. In particular, for Mackie of all companies to complain is a serious case of the pot calling the kettle black, since Mackie's designs were themselves direct rip-offs of Neve circuits made with cheaper components and more efficient manufacturing. Let's not forget that for some time, Mackie was the poster child for cheap "prosumer" knockoffs, and was for years the most widely-despised brand among "serious" audio engineers for exactly the stuff that they have accused Behringer of doing.

...I was given good advice when I started hanging out here, to wit, spend little and buy cheap and you'll end up upgrading several times and end up with cheap gear you've outgrown and never gets used...

And as a general rule, that is very good advice, and advice that I have often given out. BUT an even more important piece of advice is to start recording as soon as possible with whatever you can afford, and then only "upgrade" when you can make it really count. The main point of the principle of saving up for stuff that will last a lifetime, IMHO, is to avoid the "intermediate" upgrades, where you go from Behringer to ART to Mackie to FMR to API to Avalon or whatever, not to say that you should not buy a preamp until you can afford an Avalon (or whatever).

...Now let's look at the MCA SP-1 that somebody said sounds like a C-414. It looks for all the world to me to be identical to the MXL 2001, only it's $10 cheaper. I found a reference on the web that says it uses the smaller diaphragm from the 903 or 603 or whatever, but it's hard for me to think there would be any other signifiacnt difference from the 2001. I have two of the 2001's that I got years ago when I was a n00b and didn't know any better. GC was running a deal, two for $100.

I will say that given the price it's impressive that they are usable at all, and they are usable. But the electronics are all very cheap components, and even if you tear in and do the Scott Dorsey upgrade (about $60 in parts cost IIRC), the capsule is still a weak point. Ther is resonance issues in the high end. If you look at the curve, the slope heading towards 10kHz looks like a hill in the Tour de France....

Well, whatever they may look like, an important difference is that the MXL 2001 sucks and the SP-1 is actually a really good mic. I would posit that a frequency chart is an almost meaningless way to evaluate a mic, otherwise we could simply use an eq to make an SM57 sound like a C12 and save $15,000 or whatever, and I'm not sure on what basis the capsule is a "weak point." But whatever works for you is fine with me.

But all of this is neither here nor there.

What "breaks the bank" is a hugely relative term, and even if we posit as a given that all cheap gear is inherently inferior to more expensive gear, there are plenty of people in the world for whom even $50 is a significant investment that they have to save up for. To dismiss out of hand any discussion of low-price gear as "turning the joint into a bottom feeder's junction" is, I think, out-of-place on the forum of the company that for years was the poster child of the cheap consumer DAW.

Cheers.

We are in a golden era with music. Make music and stop complaining about how lucky we are.

i've owned maybe a dozen pieces of behringer gear mostly for live use and i've never had any of it fail on me. i did have one compressor that never worked out of the box but the unit i exchanged it for worked fine for 6 years until i sold it. i think for the most part if it works out of the box it will continue to work.

a friend of mine built a whole PA out of behr stuff ( except speakers & mics ) and wouldn't have been able to afford that stuff NEW if the behringer stuff wasn't around. it's certainly hard to complain about stuff that is decidedly ENTRY LEVEL.