Midnight, I have a good friend who used to work for Yamaha for quite a while, teaching people how to use their 6-digit-figure mixers.
He despises Behringer on principles alone. He says they will simply rip off, completely mimic, not even try to hide the fact that they are ripping off. (I mean, they'll just copy the cosmetics too). It works for them because in the end the profits outweigh paying the legal fees. Simple as that. So, he just hates Behringer as a company. He would personally be disappointed in me as a friend if I bought Behringer!
I asked which products he thought of. He mentioned mixers (and Behringer never touched the price points of the units he himself was working with), and they included both Yamaha and Mackie products. I think the Yam was like a v01 or something (?), and the Mackie was a 6018, or was it 1860, oh I don't remember. Think it was made in '02 or something, and he did say it was an important evolution at the time. And this is just mixers!
He never mentioned the products that are in your images you've posted.
I'm an engineer plus a dj... so, I see this from two sides.
My dayjob is as an engineer. When we decide to build something new, one of the major factors is the units that need to be built in order for the engineering costs to make sense. If we didn't have those costs, and just reverse engineered everything, we could sell things a lot cheaper.
There isn't anything wrong with reverse engineering in itself. I do it all the time, car companies even trade cars with eachother. You learn a lot by seeing how other people do things. But, in the end, you have to build your own product and not build a customer base on "it looks like the real thing!"
Mackie and Behringer, on a very abstract level, kind of had the same goals, they just had different ways of achieving them.
Mackie really brought a lot of professional products, and still does, to an affordable price level. They have some very expensive lines, but really its all relative because pro-gear has a cost. It's fairly low volume, most importantly.
A lot of stuff is picked up second hand, and there is a used market that gets people started in the more expensive gear. But, Mackie really prices their stuff pretty well for what it is, in my opinion.
Behringer took the route of making inexpensive gear that looks and acts like its more expensive base. They make gear that looks like something that looks professional. Without engineering costs, the cost of development is much lower, and with a product that looks like what people would otherwise want, and at a pricepoint that is much lower and therefore a volume much higher, they can make 200 dollar pairs of speakers, mixers that cost a fraction, and so forth.
This ticked off sound guys, engineers at other companies, musicians, and finally businessmen who were looking at margins... and then to the lawyers. haha
Now, when WmAx says something works superbly, I wouldn't bet against it! However, the performance of any very particular product is a completely separate argument from morals and/or principles. Even if a complete, unabashed ripoff. In the imagined case it happened to be that a 2030 was less performing than some Genelec, by say 1%, it would be impossible to argue the merits of value between the contestants. I think WmAx pushes these products a lot, not only because he thinks they are the best at any reasonable budget, but because they may still be the best when compared to more unreasonable budgets. Chris seems to be very focused on performance for the dollar. I suppose, when dedicated to improving the real paramters of sound reproduction, perhaps the most prominent culprit to overcome, for most people, is money.
Really this discussion spurred from the Bose thread, which was starting to talk about morals. When Behringer was brought up, I couldn't resist. But, its hard to talk about one without the other.
I appreciate benefit/dollar. I'm not a massive Genelec fan or anything, but I wouldn't say the Behringers are within 1% to the Genelec's they mimiced, let alone the newer models. There are monitors more reasonably priced than the Genelecs that I think are comparible though, but they are still certainly more expensive than the Behringers.
A lot of the people who dislike Behringer didn't originally know about the copying, it was just within their budget and it worked... until it didn't... and then they started to wonder why no one else at the gig was using Behringer...
At least in Miami, Behringer kinda made a stand in some of the smaller clubs, but when they couldn't get support, those clubs stopped buying their stuff also. Because, to spend double the money for an amp was worth it if it lasts longer and they can get support if it breaks.
The whole "you ganked this company" thing is related, but, fairly seperate.
Forget difficulty, forget complexity, forget WAF, forget whatever, with any particular nature of component. I'm not going to ask Chris what he thinks of allegedly poor morals/principles of any Behringer product, whether it's patent infringement, or
violating FCC rules or a much lesser offense. I just try to take his offerings FWIW. It would be unwise not to litsen to him, if one's goal was to learn more about audio reproduction. Yeah, sure, I'll take my grains of salt here and there, but only because I have my own compromises I need to deal with.
Due to my good friend's strong hatred toward Behringer, do I find, every once in a while, that it is difficult for me to recommend Behringer product. For which I've probably recommended a hundred times.
The friend happens to be an avid musician, composer, and built a great deal of panels for his apartment-turned-music-studio. Now, he's just a CS guy for Roland, because he didn't want to travel as much.
We all have the best intentions on what we recommend here. I think that all the members here have a different strength in that. And if we all agreed, we wouldn't have very interesting threads.
