6 ms·

It’s sad how the entire music industry of actual innovators gets scooped up by conglomerates like InMusic. What is worse, however, is the blatant rip-off busin

It’s sad how the entire music industry of actual innovators gets scooped up by conglomerates like InMusic. What is worse, however, is the blatant rip-off business plan of Behringer. They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. Wanna know why Behringers product line exclusively features other peoples designs that have gone out of patent (or not, see Mackie ripoffs they built their base with). You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware.

Sosh101 3y ago
Behringer did release their own "Neutron" (and soon "Proton"), but I generally agree with your points. Also they've cloned Moog gear that's <10 years old.
- comboy 3y ago
  I can blindly distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio and I don't even have good ears (at least for one instrument I did that experiment on). It's just a signal, I'm sure it can be copied perfectly but Moog still seems to be doing wrooms like no other.
  - ulfbert_inc 3y ago
    Pretty sure they managed to clone Model D really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYxc8R_Qys0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYxc8R_Qys0
  - Sosh101 3y ago
    > I can blindly distinguish distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio Which Moog/Behringer combo was it? In the case of DFAM/Edge the filters are different (Ladder vs. something more standard) > It's just a signal I don't think that's fair. Analogue stuff goes through a signal path with so many different components where even minuscule differences at any point could lead to quite different results at the end.
- elihu 3y ago
  It would be funny if there was a community effort to make a schematic of the Neutron or Proton, design a board, and have it manufactured at JLCPCB or wherever. Sell it as a kit with all the SMD components already populated, all you have to do is solder in the through-hole jacks and pots and whatever. Use a Eurorack module form factor so it doesn't need an enclosure. Sell it at cost, which would probably be way less than the Behringer product sells for.
  - glimshe 3y ago
    I think you are underestimating the difficulty of producing something. Just check what happens with 90% of kickstarters that need to produce stuff. And I know what I'm talking about because I thought about doing something like what you propose for a while, and I concluded that I'd never be able to beat Behringer. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just not easy and Behringer has a lot of merit in being efficient at producing these synths.
    - Applejinx 3y ago
      You can't make a business doing that, quite correct. If there is any other merit to what you're looking to do, and you can float the cost, you can make a thing happen and see if it's too niche for Behringer: if it's that popular, you'll get a knock-off for pennies on the dollar and your best bet is to position yourself as the original, and accept your market got ate. I don't think Moog is ONLY selling out because its Minimoog got cloned by the Behringer D, but I've owned a Behringer D and soundwise it wasn't half bad: many decisions made were in the service of the thing actually sounding good, at least in the revision I had. I own a Moog Sub Phatty and swapped out the side panels for aftermarket wood ones, because it had the 'sticky plastic' issue, and the octave switch for octave 1 ain't working. The flagship Moog One synths have had some issues. This sort of thing is brutal on a small business… they're paying more for their parts and labor, but they'll run into the same issues that Behringer or any manufacturer will. You won't out-Behringer Behringer. It's exactly the sort of T-Rex you don't want to battle directly. There is nothing stopping you from being a small mammal scurrying about making stuff. Come up with a business model that bootstraps and does what you need, and don't attempt to get capital that would demand a 10x return while knowing Behringer exists, as you can't have a 10x return at all, ever. You can probably still make stuff but you have to design the business, not just the product.
chuchana 3y ago
I completely agree with you, but how is that not capitalism?
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Seems like capitalism at work to me. Is the implication capitalism is somehow intrinsically ethical? That’s a laugh.
progre 3y ago
While I'm no fan of Uli's business practises, he does expose the fact that the uniqueness of a lot of gear is way overstated. And we havent seen actual innovation from the likes of Moog, Roland, Korg since the 90:ies maybe. So if they insist on repackeging the same ROMpler and Curtis chips at ever higher prices... Clone away.
- LegitShady 3y ago
  unfortunately he also clones things that aren't Rompler and curtis chips. I have a behringer model d and a pro one. They're fine machines. But when they Behringer Swing seems to me to be a 1:1 clone of the Arturia Keystep which is not an old device, I kind of understand why everyone hates Behringer.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Let's be clear: cloning stuff where the patent has expired is not remotely unethical in an intrinsic sense. Even if you launch the product the very day the patent expires. It's a clear part of the social contract of innovation patents. Society says: - Ideas aren't things you can really own - Copying stuff means more choice for consumers and lower prices. - But copying stuff before the innovator has a chance to earn from their work is bad for innovation. - If we agree an idea is novel and non-trivial (patentable), we grant the innovator the exclusive right to manufacture, to licence, or not to licence, the implementation they describe for a limited period of time, if and only if they describe it in enough detail to reproduce it. - In so doing, we provoke further innovation as people try to achieve the same without infringing the patent. That last one is the secondary outcome, not the primary intent of patent law. The primary intent is to grant limited protection for patent holders to have a chance to earn from their work. "You explain how you did this so other people can do it in the future, and we will grant you the right to licence that idea exclusively for about half your professional lifetime." Beyond that point, implementing the design is what absolutely should happen -- that is why the patent is basically education about the design itself. Implementing clones of expired patents is a social good. It actually proves the value of the patent system over the longer term. If we call this behaviour -- if it infringes no other designs -- unethical, we're really arguing for corporate welfare based on goodwill. That isn't how it's meant to work. Now, whether Behringer is unethical is another matter. There would seem to be enough other evidence of that! But implementing expired patents is not bad, even if you literally start selling them the day the patent expires. Go for it. There are similar issues with TTArtisan and 7 Artisan lenses. Yeah, expired patents of good lenses deserve to be implemented, updated, tweaked, and sold more cheaply. Everyone benefits. But do they have to hew so close to other people's design language too?
- notmypenguin 3y ago
  It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well! Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up. Behringer is bad for the music gear industry, and I say that as a producer and musician of over 40 years. I wish them a swift exit from this world, but the reality is their cheap products tempt many people but it’s extremely shortsighted to ever buy Behringer.
midoridensha 3y ago
It's sad how some people think companies should have perpetual monopolies on things that were patented 50+ years ago.
- dryrun 3y ago
  What about stuff from two years ago?
  - midoridensha 3y ago
    Well patented stuff from 2 years ago is still covered by patent, so you can't copy it without getting sued usually. That's why the patent system exists.
elihu 3y ago
You're using as an example of bad behavior one of the best examples of something good that Behringer has done. Those chips should be cloned, and now there are, I believe, at least three manufacturers of 3340 oscillator chips: CEM, Coolaudio, and Alfa. It's a very popular VCO chip in a number of eurorack modules, and has better tracking of volt-per-octave than any other analog VCO type I've used by far. Also, not very long ago those chips had been out of production. I believe CEM re-released their 3340 in 2016. I'm not sure if Coolaudio beat them to it, but anyways there was a long period where the only way to get new batches of the chip would have been to clone it. There are a lot of examples of legitimately bad behavior from Behringer as well.
- notmypenguin 3y ago
  Tell that to Curtis widow. The goal of this is not magnanimity but to drive other synth makers to bankruptcy with cheap zero R&D synths. I am not speaking out of my behind here. If Behringer succeeds, the world of music gear LOSES. If you want a 3340 clone buy Alfa for half the price and don’t feed CoolAudio
  - glimshe 3y ago
    I'm sorry for her, but why do you think she's entitled to eternal earnings over this invention? When husbands die, the widow is lucky if they left behind savings and some real estate - that's what one should expect. If this invention is so good, the original Curtis could have used his earnings at the time to buy other durable assets instead of expecting the invention to be giving dividends forever. Let's remember that every invention builds on top of many other invention that are leveraged free of cost (like the transistor in this case).
  - sireat 3y ago
    I did not like Behringer in the 90s when they built their original fortune by violating Mackie patents. However, what is wrong with perfectly cloning a chip whose patents have expired? Analogy would be with a drug whose patents have expired. If generic analogs are available, everone benefits except the original company. Everyone wins, who is the loser here? Curtis family have the right to be upset but they do not have the right to perpetual profits. https://ask.audio/articles/curtis-family-speaks-out-against-behringer-synth-clone-plans-using-cem3340 https://ask.audio/articles/curtis-family-speaks-out-against-...
x3874 3y ago
OMG, here we have another one... > They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. Because OnChip Systems were totally getting their act together and fulfilled the demand for vintage re-issues? Nope, not at all, they sat on their asses just like Roland. (Nice annecdote re: sitting on their asses / not fulfilling market demand: It is an open secret Dave Smith didn't want to re-issue his old but very much in-demand designs but was basically forced by B's Pro-16 announcement to develop their P5 rev 4, otherwise the Seq fanbois would not have gotten that! Makes one wonder about the backstory of howbthe OB-X8 came to life...) But at least Curtis' widow pulled off publishing a public statement condemning Behringer 'hurting' Curtis' legacy. Oh wow. And what is your opinion on Alfa Rpar? Should they be disallowed to produce reissues too? Are you even aware of their existence?
sneak 3y ago
I, for one, am very happy that Behringer is making $350 devilfish 303s despite what that nice fellow in Australia thinks about it. He wasn't going to get my money anyway.
johnwheeler 3y ago
They make great synths though and sell them, for cheap. Pretty damn innovative to me. You can compete on differentiation, niche, or cost right? That’s all good business and good for the consumer. Ideas are only as valuable as their execution makes them. Otherwise, there’d be lots of “ideas” for sale on eBay.
adql 3y ago
Sure I am annoyed that in many cases they rip it 1:1 without improvement, and that they rip some products actively in production. But in greater scheme of things it's some products authors already paid NRE few tens or hundreds times over vs musician having access to gear they couldn't dream of owning few years ago. And I have absolutely no problems with cloning products already out of production. > You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware. Oh you sweet summer child if you only knew how often the designs are copied with slight change in that space... hell, whole guitar pedal market is incest over incest for last 60+ years > They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. ...so the chip is still produced and people can use it vs possibly going out of business. How is that bad ?

Sosh101 3y ago

Behringer did release their own "Neutron" (and soon "Proton"), but I generally agree with your points. Also they've cloned Moog gear that's <10 years old.

comboy 3y ago
I can blindly distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio and I don't even have good ears (at least for one instrument I did that experiment on). It's just a signal, I'm sure it can be copied perfectly but Moog still seems to be doing wrooms like no other.
- ulfbert_inc 3y ago
  Pretty sure they managed to clone Model D really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYxc8R_Qys0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYxc8R_Qys0
- Sosh101 3y ago
  > I can blindly distinguish distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio Which Moog/Behringer combo was it? In the case of DFAM/Edge the filters are different (Ladder vs. something more standard) > It's just a signal I don't think that's fair. Analogue stuff goes through a signal path with so many different components where even minuscule differences at any point could lead to quite different results at the end.
elihu 3y ago
It would be funny if there was a community effort to make a schematic of the Neutron or Proton, design a board, and have it manufactured at JLCPCB or wherever. Sell it as a kit with all the SMD components already populated, all you have to do is solder in the through-hole jacks and pots and whatever. Use a Eurorack module form factor so it doesn't need an enclosure. Sell it at cost, which would probably be way less than the Behringer product sells for.
- glimshe 3y ago
  I think you are underestimating the difficulty of producing something. Just check what happens with 90% of kickstarters that need to produce stuff. And I know what I'm talking about because I thought about doing something like what you propose for a while, and I concluded that I'd never be able to beat Behringer. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just not easy and Behringer has a lot of merit in being efficient at producing these synths.
  - Applejinx 3y ago
    You can't make a business doing that, quite correct. If there is any other merit to what you're looking to do, and you can float the cost, you can make a thing happen and see if it's too niche for Behringer: if it's that popular, you'll get a knock-off for pennies on the dollar and your best bet is to position yourself as the original, and accept your market got ate. I don't think Moog is ONLY selling out because its Minimoog got cloned by the Behringer D, but I've owned a Behringer D and soundwise it wasn't half bad: many decisions made were in the service of the thing actually sounding good, at least in the revision I had. I own a Moog Sub Phatty and swapped out the side panels for aftermarket wood ones, because it had the 'sticky plastic' issue, and the octave switch for octave 1 ain't working. The flagship Moog One synths have had some issues. This sort of thing is brutal on a small business… they're paying more for their parts and labor, but they'll run into the same issues that Behringer or any manufacturer will. You won't out-Behringer Behringer. It's exactly the sort of T-Rex you don't want to battle directly. There is nothing stopping you from being a small mammal scurrying about making stuff. Come up with a business model that bootstraps and does what you need, and don't attempt to get capital that would demand a 10x return while knowing Behringer exists, as you can't have a 10x return at all, ever. You can probably still make stuff but you have to design the business, not just the product.

chuchana 3y ago

I completely agree with you, but how is that not capitalism?

spacemadness 3y ago
Seems like capitalism at work to me. Is the implication capitalism is somehow intrinsically ethical? That’s a laugh.

progre 3y ago

While I'm no fan of Uli's business practises, he does expose the fact that the uniqueness of a lot of gear is way overstated. And we havent seen actual innovation from the likes of Moog, Roland, Korg since the 90:ies maybe. So if they insist on repackeging the same ROMpler and Curtis chips at ever higher prices... Clone away.

LegitShady 3y ago
unfortunately he also clones things that aren't Rompler and curtis chips. I have a behringer model d and a pro one. They're fine machines. But when they Behringer Swing seems to me to be a 1:1 clone of the Arturia Keystep which is not an old device, I kind of understand why everyone hates Behringer.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

Let's be clear: cloning stuff where the patent has expired is not remotely unethical in an intrinsic sense. Even if you launch the product the very day the patent expires. It's a clear part of the social contract of innovation patents. Society says: - Ideas aren't things you can really own - Copying stuff means more choice for consumers and lower prices. - But copying stuff before the innovator has a chance to earn from their work is bad for innovation. - If we agree an idea is novel and non-trivial (patentable), we grant the innovator the exclusive right to manufacture, to licence, or not to licence, the implementation they describe for a limited period of time, if and only if they describe it in enough detail to reproduce it. - In so doing, we provoke further innovation as people try to achieve the same without infringing the patent. That last one is the secondary outcome, not the primary intent of patent law. The primary intent is to grant limited protection for patent holders to have a chance to earn from their work. "You explain how you did this so other people can do it in the future, and we will grant you the right to licence that idea exclusively for about half your professional lifetime." Beyond that point, implementing the design is what absolutely should happen -- that is why the patent is basically education about the design itself. Implementing clones of expired patents is a social good. It actually proves the value of the patent system over the longer term. If we call this behaviour -- if it infringes no other designs -- unethical, we're really arguing for corporate welfare based on goodwill. That isn't how it's meant to work. Now, whether Behringer is unethical is another matter. There would seem to be enough other evidence of that! But implementing expired patents is not bad, even if you literally start selling them the day the patent expires. Go for it. There are similar issues with TTArtisan and 7 Artisan lenses. Yeah, expired patents of good lenses deserve to be implemented, updated, tweaked, and sold more cheaply. Everyone benefits. But do they have to hew so close to other people's design language too?

notmypenguin 3y ago
It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well! Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up. Behringer is bad for the music gear industry, and I say that as a producer and musician of over 40 years. I wish them a swift exit from this world, but the reality is their cheap products tempt many people but it’s extremely shortsighted to ever buy Behringer.

midoridensha 3y ago

It's sad how some people think companies should have perpetual monopolies on things that were patented 50+ years ago.

dryrun 3y ago
What about stuff from two years ago?
- midoridensha 3y ago
  Well patented stuff from 2 years ago is still covered by patent, so you can't copy it without getting sued usually. That's why the patent system exists.

elihu 3y ago

You're using as an example of bad behavior one of the best examples of something good that Behringer has done. Those chips should be cloned, and now there are, I believe, at least three manufacturers of 3340 oscillator chips: CEM, Coolaudio, and Alfa. It's a very popular VCO chip in a number of eurorack modules, and has better tracking of volt-per-octave than any other analog VCO type I've used by far. Also, not very long ago those chips had been out of production. I believe CEM re-released their 3340 in 2016. I'm not sure if Coolaudio beat them to it, but anyways there was a long period where the only way to get new batches of the chip would have been to clone it. There are a lot of examples of legitimately bad behavior from Behringer as well.

notmypenguin 3y ago
Tell that to Curtis widow. The goal of this is not magnanimity but to drive other synth makers to bankruptcy with cheap zero R&D synths. I am not speaking out of my behind here. If Behringer succeeds, the world of music gear LOSES. If you want a 3340 clone buy Alfa for half the price and don’t feed CoolAudio
- glimshe 3y ago
  I'm sorry for her, but why do you think she's entitled to eternal earnings over this invention? When husbands die, the widow is lucky if they left behind savings and some real estate - that's what one should expect. If this invention is so good, the original Curtis could have used his earnings at the time to buy other durable assets instead of expecting the invention to be giving dividends forever. Let's remember that every invention builds on top of many other invention that are leveraged free of cost (like the transistor in this case).
- sireat 3y ago
  I did not like Behringer in the 90s when they built their original fortune by violating Mackie patents. However, what is wrong with perfectly cloning a chip whose patents have expired? Analogy would be with a drug whose patents have expired. If generic analogs are available, everone benefits except the original company. Everyone wins, who is the loser here? Curtis family have the right to be upset but they do not have the right to perpetual profits. https://ask.audio/articles/curtis-family-speaks-out-against-behringer-synth-clone-plans-using-cem3340 https://ask.audio/articles/curtis-family-speaks-out-against-...

x3874 3y ago

OMG, here we have another one... > They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. Because OnChip Systems were totally getting their act together and fulfilled the demand for vintage re-issues? Nope, not at all, they sat on their asses just like Roland. (Nice annecdote re: sitting on their asses / not fulfilling market demand: It is an open secret Dave Smith didn't want to re-issue his old but very much in-demand designs but was basically forced by B's Pro-16 announcement to develop their P5 rev 4, otherwise the Seq fanbois would not have gotten that! Makes one wonder about the backstory of howbthe OB-X8 came to life...) But at least Curtis' widow pulled off publishing a public statement condemning Behringer 'hurting' Curtis' legacy. Oh wow. And what is your opinion on Alfa Rpar? Should they be disallowed to produce reissues too? Are you even aware of their existence?

sneak 3y ago

I, for one, am very happy that Behringer is making $350 devilfish 303s despite what that nice fellow in Australia thinks about it. He wasn't going to get my money anyway.

johnwheeler 3y ago

They make great synths though and sell them, for cheap. Pretty damn innovative to me. You can compete on differentiation, niche, or cost right? That’s all good business and good for the consumer. Ideas are only as valuable as their execution makes them. Otherwise, there’d be lots of “ideas” for sale on eBay.

adql 3y ago

Sure I am annoyed that in many cases they rip it 1:1 without improvement, and that they rip some products actively in production. But in greater scheme of things it's some products authors already paid NRE few tens or hundreds times over vs musician having access to gear they couldn't dream of owning few years ago. And I have absolutely no problems with cloning products already out of production. > You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware. Oh you sweet summer child if you only knew how often the designs are copied with slight change in that space... hell, whole guitar pedal market is incest over incest for last 60+ years > They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. ...so the chip is still produced and people can use it vs possibly going out of business. How is that bad ?