Behringer clones

[David_Rothbaum]

i know i will regret participating in an internet argument but that said. . .

i think there is a huge difference between remaking a thing that is no longer available and making a copy of a current thing and undercutting the original on price because you have the means to do so. if all behringer did was make rad, affordable versions of things no longer available that would be great! my issue with them is that they steal stuff from current companies and sell it cheaper because they can. this is likely all legal but as @zebra put so eloquently, is “ick”.

the recent euro case behriger announced is a good example. it is a clear rip-off of the tiptop mantis case. not cool.

[slowsounds]

I think copying existing products to undercut competitors is lame and whether you are Behringer or Mackie or whatever I think being an unnecessarily litigious company to intimidate or stomp out competition is a really bad look. when you copy something existing 1:1 (case design, so on), you are a bootlegger. I don’t know a ton about pedals so someone correct me here, but I guess one could look at a company like Mooer as maybe being the “better” model - yes its clones, many of them being classic circuits cloned many times previously already, but in their specific micro-form factor, that format which has come into popularity in its own right so it was clearly filling some gap of people looking for compact solutions or less knobby variants of things they never change settings on anyway.

now here comes the bigtime sourpuss… that said when I see threads like this where we say oh stop copying existing products and suing people, just make a synthi clone and I’m all over it… something doesn’t sit right with me. even if we want to critique bootlegging to me the real core of this is that Behringer’s overall model at this point is that they see this gear lust market and by whatever means will make money by catering to it. generally this is via a race to the bottom in terms of production values and quality or by bootlegging to a point of ridiculousness- its a marketing tactic like Ryanair uses as far as I’m concerned. but, lets not forget that we are talking about instruments that in a matter of a short period of time went from being completely inaccessible to those outside of academics/research to being purchasable by kids or replicated digitally for free. while I don’t think that the bar for entry into any kind of art being lowered economically is bad, but the scale of production of these instruments (synths in general I mean) like almost any other material good seems preposterous. as a result you then get undercut clones, infinite half-baked un-optimized variations of similar products, instruments going to market with incomplete firmware… we can’t blame it all on Behringer, they are just really cornering the market on this idea. I don’t find the practice of other companies rushing new products to market every season all that much better, and it is our buying and artistic production and fetishization habits that can drive a lot of this.

[mattlowery]

So, I’m kind of interested to hear how members of the “ick” camp feel about things like generic brands (think CVS brand toothpaste that is chemically identical to Colgate), generic pharmaceuticals (that $4 prescription that is sold instead of the $150 version that is chemically identical), and white label stores like Trader Joe’s.

I’m not poking at you. I am genuinely interested.

And I’m interested in your moral/ethical viewpoint. Whether or not it’s legal is clearly not the sticking point in this thread.

[slowsounds]

I’m not really gonna go into the others, particularly pharmaceuticals because its a gross area that would derail this thread like a coin on a track… but these aren’t really apt comparisons. something like generic label food products are a demonstration of how much consumers are fooled by marketing, imaging, and packaging design. however, often those products are wholesaled by original manufacturers to such stores at discount. The grocery store doesn’t reverse engineer a recipe and build a pasta factory to bootleg Barilla and then sue them.

[jnoble]

i think there is a huge difference between remaking a thing that is no longer available and making a copy of a current thing and undercutting the original on price because you have the means to do so.

Compaq did exactly this with their painstaking clean room clone of the IBM PC, and we are all beneficiaries (or victims, if you prefer ) of the ensuing explosion of cheap, compatible computers.

Edited to include:

the recent euro case behriger announced is a good example. it is a clear rip-off of the tiptop mantis case. not cool.

Well, the Behringer is a slightly crazy 140hp wide, for starters, and the idea of an injection molded shallow 6U case is hardly groundbreaking: lots of people would do it if they had the capital. But Tiptop is a huge cloner themselves with the drum modules–which even use Roland’s famous 808 and 909 model numbers in the product names! Then there’s the bogus stacking cable lawsuit … see how this works?

Society shouldn’t exist exist to serve business’ profit motives, in my view, except insofar as those motives serve the public good. Monopolies are terrible and should be limited as much as possible. Anyone interested in this subject should read Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1841 speeches in the British House of Commons: ASU Law School Page If you want to dig deeper, I very much enjoyed this, from 1878 in the USA: International Copyright

@zebra, when the Behringer cable tester came out, Ebtech was selling theirs for a grossly inflated $149 ($213 adjusted for inflation!!), and Behringer introduced theirs for $59–proving how insane the pricing on the Ebtech was (and probably still is at $99 and no longer “Made in the U.S.A.”). I would consider making a knockoff like that just to prove a point, to be honest, and the consumer wins.

But it’s one thing to have an idea, which is the cheapest thing on Earth, and quite another to execute it well with all the attendant things you must do as a company. I think we can all agree that deception is bad, but beyond that the market will decide.

Best to everyone in the new decade.

[Mattb]

i think there is a huge difference between remaking a thing that is no longer available and making a copy of a current thing and undercutting the original on price

Model 10 and 15 are still on the market.

[petesasqwax]

To be honest, the whole Behringer discussion is infinitely more interesting to me when it makes me examine how I feel about my own purchases. I’ve glibly said that I would buy a Behri Synthi or VCS3, but I won’t know whether I actually would until I’m faced with the possibility of doing so. I will buy an Odyssey at some stage but will get a KARP module rather than a Behri. If there is a KARP 2600 I will buy that too. Is that hypocritical? What certainly does feel hypocritical is that, when I needed a mic for recording a podcast interview, I didn’t have any issue buying what is ostensibly a Behringer clone of the SM58 - it was £12 and I didn’t want to spend any more than that if I didn’t need to. Does it absolve me because it’s not a synth? Maybe because it isn’t something that is central to my process? No, of course it doesn’t. It’s hypocrisy and I’m not at all sure what that says about it or how I feel about it. It’s a good mic for £12 though…

[aeoner]

Hi!

I wanna offer a slightly different perspective.

First of all, I´m not comfortable with Behringer clones.I don´t own Berhinger gear (although my first DJ mixer was a Behringer, 14 years ago) and I don´t plan to own it (even if I feel tempted by the ones like the 303 clone).

The whole idea of a big company based on ripping off circuits, models and electronic music gear, with a very aggressive attitude is very problematic to me. I understand that it is possible to sell really affordable electronic music instruments being creative, smart and kind - as Korg and Teenage Engineering have done in the past years with the Pocket Operators and Volca lines.

Said that, I need to contextualize Behringer in the reality that I live. For that, I´ll take the example (even a little extreme) of the “Boog” x “Minimoog Model D”.

In Brazil a Model D is sold by forty times the minimum wage - and there are dozens of millions of people there, including friends that makes electronic music, that lives basically with the minimum wage. By contrast, a Boog costs two times the minimum wage.

Although the Model D example is radical because of the concept of the Moog product (“limited” edition, a little colectors item etc) it’s true that for brazillians Behringer in many areas isn’t a choice, but the only possibility - by the way, there are local (even) cheap(er) clones of some stuff that Behringer itself copies (mixing boards for example) and there’s even some respect to Behringer as a “german company”.

[Trebbers]

I don’t care for Behringer as a company, but it’s not because of copying old synths. That it’s considered normal that companies (or their corporate descendants) maintain some proprietary moral interest in the look/feel/design of 30+ year old products is gross.

[jnoble]

i would probably even be cheering if the new synths showed any sign of being new designs instead of aping the appearance and UI of their predecessors.

Deepmind and Neutron are both excellent new designs and are widely regarded as such.

i decidedly do not agree with him that any practice that increases consumer choice must also be good.

That’s not my position. Unacceptable behavior includes: deception through trade dress or trademark infringement; theft of trade secrets (which is often too technical for laymen including myself to define with sufficient precision); patent infringement; collusion and other restraints of trade; predatory dumping, especially with government support–there are quite a few things I object to for various reasons even though they increase consumer choice and/or decrease cost.

As far as the libel lawsuit thing, I have a different take on it after looking in detail at the actual GS posts, the related activity, and the timeline of events. I think it was a bad PR move, but on the other hand should someone just sit by and take defamation from a competitor’s employee in an important public forum? It’s a tough call, but I know I would be pissed off. With that said, your position is understandable as a loyal friend.

[Trebbers]

It wasn’t defamation. The suit was meritless, and obviously meant to silence legally protected opinion. Behringer, having made it to the top by pushing (and pushing past) the bounds of legality/ethics, now wants to be talked about as though had been a respectable company all along.

[Mattb]

The whole idea of a big company based on ripping off circuits

But if it is a small company doing the same thing, is it acceptable?

Tiptop Audio, to name one, did one-to-one clones (as they even claim on their website) of circuity found in Roland gear.Then they threatened legal action against another company for daring to put on the market banana cables claiming they were un-authorized copies of their own stackable.

AION copied model 10 and 15 (which by the way are still in production) modules schematics for the eurorack format, even claiming in one of their ads they are the ‘original’.

I could go on with many other examples

I cannot care less for Behringer to be honest, I only owned one of their mixers 30 years ago, and recently acquired a PRO_1 which Im not planning to hold onto for very long.

Absolutely nothing personal, but I am just a tad annoyed with what I honestly perceive as hypocresy.

[mattlowery]

Ok, so, enough devil’s advocate on my part. Here’s how I actually feel.

I think that ideas are the only truly valuable, eternal things that human beings are capable of producing. And I think that human creativity leveraged toward artistic endeavors produces some of the most profound and enduring ideas. Behringer has points in the positive and negative column for me (every company does), but way more in the negative column. As such, I don’t really buy their stuff. I own one Behringer synth (a Model D).

I agree that healthy competition discourages price gouging. But I do not consider shameless rips of products that are currently being produced at reasonable price points (MS-20, et al) to be competition done in good faith.

As I said earlier, I have voted (and continue to do so) with my dollars. Any thought experiments I’ve proposed above are intended to help folks dig in a little deeper and suss out why they believe what they believe (which is always a good thing). They are not some half-cocked analogy intended to equate one thing to another.

[aeoner]

Hi @Mattb! First, I need to insist that my central point is a little complex, as I personally don´t like Behringer style but I understand that for a lot of people that lives in poor countries like Brazil this isn´t exactly a discussion because you don´t have the possibility of owning other gear than Behringer.

So even if it´s brutal an unethical, it´s true that in some places Uri is offering “synths for the masses” and not just cheap clones for people that could afford (even with some effort) the real ones. In that context, I stay with the artists and the music - although personally I prefer to not own B´s stuff.

But answering your question, yes, I found it (or used to found it) acceptable.

Don´t know about Tiptop Audio stories or AION, but I´m not (or wasn´t) bothered by Cyclone Analogic TR´s and TB clones nor MFB TR-808 “pocket” clone.

I don´t feel that they are producing those gear because they wanna get rich ripping off classic circuits. I understand that they are looking for a niche and were doing their stuff before Roland Boutiques.

However, to be honest, after the Boutiques I´m more doubtful if I still support those independent initiatives, as Roland is back with affordable versions. Still, I´m not offended by those small companies in the way that I am by Behringer attitude in general.

[caelmore]

I have a lot to say about this topic, and none of it is good, so I’m just going to mute the thread and see myself out.

[buddhafingers]

Hello Everyone!

I’d like to offer a new take on some of this. I work in open source which in general means that my code can be copied/modified/implemented by whomever and I also implement code from many other parties. What are these circuits but code and why do we feel so different about some logic cast into a physical form over data saved in a program?

I choose to view these recreation efforts as the result of natural culling. Only the best designs and circuits (ideas) are getting cloned based on demand therefore I postulate that Behringer is simply the hall of fame.

At some point someone copied the guitar. We have become so advanced so quickly that in today we would simply use the technology of yesterday as building blocks. While they are making outright copies, we as a society may loose the ability or desire to remanufacture either the whole design or the components of the design and stymy any designs that relied upon them. Just as music is to be heard, instruments are to be played and their remanufacture will leave their tool marks on music for generations to come. Right now it may be easy to paint them as vile and terrible. In the future they may be heros.

[equipoise]

I couldn’t disagree more.

[petesasqwax]

Deepmind and Neutron are both excellent new designs and are widely regarded as such.

Herein lies the essence of what I truly don’t understand… but maybe I do if I’m cynical. Behringer have assembled a collection of very talented engineers and designers. With these people in place they could be sidestepping the whole issue of clones and instead focusing on bringing entirely new products to market. Why do they not do that, then? I have to suspect that it’s because of things like this very thread i.e. the dubious old maxim that “no publicity is bad publicity”

[jnoble]

It wasn’t defamation. The suit was meritless, and obviously meant to silence legally protected opinion.

You should look up the tort of “tortious interference” and ponder how it applies to the unprotected opinions of an acknowledged employee of a competitor whose employer has already agreed to cease and desist. Naming “Does 1-infinity”, which people exaggerated into a blanket lawsuit against GS posters, looks bad but is standard practice in this kind of suit. Again, bad PR but the suit wasn’t as frivolous as many made it out to be. You do have to have some familiarity with legal procedure and case law to get some perspective.

[Trebbers]

Unprotected opinions aren’t a thing in the US. Behringer lost on the basis that their lawsuit was designed to deter protected speech.

Also, the agreement between Behringer and the DSI employee is irrelevant. The deal was as long as he didn’t exercise his constitutional right to express his opinion of Behringer, they wouldn’t sue him. Well, he expressed, they sued, and they lost.