I've owned 3 Behringer amps
at my normal listening volume an industrial fan would be no issue
Call me a glutton for punishement but I keep coming back because they are an extraordinary value AND they do actually sound good.....when they work properly.
My 1st Behringer was an A500. Bought of ebay. Instantly from get go that device had the piano distortion from hell problem. When playing soft music with piano solos, you can easily hear significant distortion from the unit. I returned it.
Despite the bad luck with that I decided to buy another A500; this time brand new. It was fine for a week. After that it also developed the piano distortion from hell. Back it went.
Frustrated, I decided to try the amplifier that the Behringer was supposedly imitating, the Alesis RA500. That amp worked fine all the time that I had it, but it just didn't sound good to me. It wasn't lively or entertaining. Returned.
Apparently the bad rep that Behringer may have devloped, at least from amplifiers, stems mainly from the A500. Their bigger amps seem to be more robust.
Because the Behringer's are cheap, and they did sound very good when they worked, I decided to give the EP2000 a try.
I've been happy with it for the 2 months I've had it. Wickedly powerful amp, way more power than I'll ever need. I also did the fan mod to make my amp very quiet.
I think I also have a better understanding of why the A500s go down so easily. Their input stages can not handle an overloaded signal. I figured this out when I found a way to set the gains properly on my EP2000. Setting the gain by ear, I managed to set the gain to 11 or 12 oclock. After devising a method of recording a 1Khz sine wave tone at 0 db and playing that tone at max volume, I found that the proper setting for the gain of my system was 9 oclock. Luckily, the EP2000 can handle overloads and doesn't suffer, and my guess is that I may have set the A500's gains to high by ear and hurt the input section of the amplifier.
Setting the gain at 9 oclock also improved the sound quality of my EP2000 significantly. There's no more a sense of saturation and I can turn up the volume all the way, being only limited by the excursions of my woofers
My EP2000 just wants to keep going up and up in volume. Another benefit is that my 8 year old daughter even likes the sound of my system now
Hope this helps. And if you decide to use that method mentioned above to set your gain, do it with the speakers dis-connected. That 1Khz tone can fry xovers and/or midranges and tweeters.
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