How is the latency? How far can a cable go without some kind of repeater?

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.

It's not about the cloning but the quality control. For years Behringer didn't make any synths, just outboard - processing modules like compressors, gates/limiters, feedback managers, effects, small mixers and so on. These were original designs rather than clones of anything. The main attraction was that they were very cheap compared to the competition; sound-wise they were mediocre except for maybe their Composer compressor which was sorta good. The cheap aspect made them quite popular with aspiring musicians, especially electronic ones. Reliability was not too big of an issue because if a Behringer unit in your rack stopped working you could afford to just replace it. But they were absolutely not up to the rigors of commercial use, lacking consistency and reliability.

I like the company in a general way because I'm a big believer in accessibility to technology for entry-level people, and innovating on price is as valid as any other area (and they have innovated in many technical areas since). There are a lot of rent seekers in the pro audio industry and Behringer found a niche in the market where they had no direct competition. After building a solid commercial foundation they rolled the profits back into other areas, from cloning classic synths and guitar pedals to acquiring high quality live sound vendors like Midas. Quality-wise, their products are now really solid.

All the things you listed are irrelevant for a touring musician. All they care about is that equipment is used that sounds good. If it's a pain to set up or manage, that's the roadie and live mix engineer's job. Not saying some behringer gear doesn't sound good, just that bands can be very specific about their sound and a blanket "no behringer" rules out a lot of cheaper bad sounding gear in 2 words.

There's also the idealogical standpoint. That Behringher rips off other designs and mass produces them cheaper off shore. I'm in 2 minds about that. I now have a 2600, which would have been impossibly expensive (even with a TTSH) for me.

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.

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.

Cloning innovative products for a much cheaper price will drive those companies out of business and cause the industry to stagnate.

A few hints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RSIWbZ6Vc

I do own a few behringer devices. They work fine for me, but I'm just a hobbyist and treat my gear with care.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

Most likely automotive stuff is specified with huge safety margins.

I agree that 15m is somewhat short, but I think this is intended to offer a lower cost offering, but be an alternative the the other networks they already support.

I for one am eager for audio networking standards to become more accessible. My biggest hopes would probably have been for a control plane protocol for AES67 to gain critical mass and force Dante and Ravenna to support it, but in the mean time this could be a nice alternative for some use cases as well.

> 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.

Yes, I agree.

Disclaimer: long-time musical instrument fan boy and designer, developer, with some experience in the industry working with a couple of well-known brands.

Behringer did what was there, sitting, ripe for picking: they made musical instruments standard (through copying) and they made them cheap - vital factors that musicians require in order to have a decent instrument/setup/workstation/etc.

Behringer revealed the huge situation with the musical-instrument business - it is very, very hard to be successful without pushing the expense on the end-user. Synths which might cost ~$180 to build are sold for ~$1800, for a reason: there are a lot of mouths to feed, metaphorically speaking.

And then, there is the brick and mortar factor - which is a massive thing, even still today, and I mean massive inasmuch as anyone paying rent so you can have a place to walk in and demo an instrument, is going to want to get that rent paid, too. And yes, there are still brick and mortar businesses around - barely. Internet has eaten everyone’s margins; but there are still hard core musician markets where an in-store demo is preferred.

So, Behringers machinations have played very well into that formula. Cheaper gear means better distribution; Behringer is bringing life back to some brick and mortar shops. I won’t mention names, but if you’re reading this and understanding it, you probably know where.

And let’s address the ‘cheap’ as in $ versus ‘cheap’ as in fragility. Behringer gear is actually kind of robust. They’ve put energy into making devices that Just Plain Work™. And since they offer value for money, why not get two or three of those “<mixers><eurorack modules><guitars pedals>&etc”.. might as well, “since I’m in the shop anyway”.

This doesn’t mean they don’t deserve some suspicion for the shenanigans, but when you see a teenager learning music get his first working home rig set up, and its a fair bit of Behringer gear, you will see the winning equation.

That is the start of a life-long passion for music, one hopes, and who knows what the other manufacturers of musical instruments will do, to respond to those shenanigans.

Many of the companies Behringer steals from are also poor, and will wither away with no sales from their innovative work.

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.

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.

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.

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.

XLR is a perfect: it'd literally designed for differential signal transmission, they're in plentiful supply on the jobsite, and 48v isn't a concern if you understand how differential and phantom feeds work anywwy.

Fortunately the audio industry isn't plagued with Apple-like "engineers" removing headphone jacks, SD card slots, USB ports, and replaceable batteries. Sure something could be "better", but there doesn't need to be.

XLRs are everywhere and already installed. You could choose cat5 but it's not as common.

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.

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.

As a person who routinely uses XLRs to carry stereo headphone feeds with TRS converters on each end, I kind of like that there are only a few connectors that do different things. I have a pelican that's already heavy enough and adding more adapters to my kit doesn't sound great.

Once you know that just because you can fit a jack in something you can't rely on it not to have 48 volts across pins, you stop putting fingers in light sockets or hooking your laptop to XLR inputs using TS->XLR adapters.

Aren't there already a number of applications using canon connectors with digital? What's your opinion about AES/EBU using XLR? Or DMX over 3-pin xlr?

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.

Once your company is big enough you have a lot of potential open doors to optimize your company structure. Everyone does this.

It's proprietary.

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...