4 ms·

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 a

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.

glimshe 3y ago
Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap). As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countries. The sheer number of decent quality clones - and I say "clone" as a good thing - they produced will be available in the secondary market for decades to come.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  And if Behringer can do it to the competition -- using their expired patents and making a still-competitive product -- then someone else can do it to Behringer.* This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection. * Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.
  - x3874 3y ago
    Even Behringer gear gets 'cloned' by the likes of Mooer and Donner these days. It is the natural way / cost of doing business. (rumor has it the Donner B1 is based on designs of B's TD-3) I don't get these sanctimonius types that go like 'oh noes, its the music / gear industry, thats different, ethics, values, full of cool dudes, etc. etc. blaaargh'. Especially mentioning ETHICS in the friggin' MUSIC INDUSTRY is just so hahaha.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      Fundamentally I think the music industry has long-standing patterns to deal with this, anyway. It's hardly new. Almost every contemporary musical instrument company in the world makes a Stratocaster (or sells one made by Aiersi or the other contemporary equivalents of Young Chang and the like). But people still buy Fender kit, including American Stratocasters and custom-shop US Stratocasters.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  They absolutely have invested in R&D. The clones are not trivial component-for-component copies. A lot of old parts aren't available any more and the circuits have to be rebuilt around what's available today. They've added MIDI and USB features. They built their own chip division to resurrect the chips of the 80s. They built products like the DeepMind which is Juno-ish but not really a clone. What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives. There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    Always fun to see Veblen Goods mentioned. There's a running joke in photography that Leicas are a great choice for a dentist.
  - notmypenguin 3y ago
    That is a blatant distortion of the truth. They have invested Nothing in New Designs, nothing For The Future, and I find your defense of Behringer utterly disingenuous. Legacy: what legacy of designs, ORIGINAL DESIGNS, has Behringer left us? R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. Name me ONE original Behringer product.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      > R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. The whole tone of your comment is rude, but this in particular is a straw man argument. R&D is just the department (and budget) of a business concerned with product improvement. That absolutely can involve improving on other people's products. And improvements can just be that it is cheaper to produce, or easier to produce at scale. The idea that R&D is a room-full of paid inventors is a myth.
    - klodolph 3y ago
      This is a misuse of the word “disingenuous”. “Disingenuous” is when someone pretends to be stupid, and there’s no valid reason to use that word here. “Disingenuous” is probably the most cliché and tired way to add unnecessary vitriol to a comment on HN.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Some of that old tech is starting to be very NOT cheap, as the chips haven't been manufactured in 30 years and stockpiles are growing ever slimmer. Germanium stuff for fuzz boxes for instance are now sometimes going for $50+ for a single transistor that would have been 25 cents a few decades ago.
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Can you prove Behringer is actually loss-leading? Selling something that does not make normal profit? If you can prove that, why can't Moog? It is simply not unethical to spot an expired patent and reproduce it at near zero profit with minimal changes, if you can make money at it. This is how patents work. If an idea works, 25 years later someone sells it cheaper, with a few modifications. Almost every product on the market now contains ideas in an expired patent. The pace of innovation means a lot of those patents expired recently. It would be unethical to try to pass it off as identical, but one of the main problems with design is companies not actively adding their own non-essential elements to design. If form follows function, then it cannot be unethical to reproduce the form when you implement the patent. There are (some) laws against making products that don't even make normal profit (by which I mean not paying the entrepreneur) if used anti-competitively. But Moog, Akai etc., would all have the kinds of lawyers who could prove it. So it is probably -- I would say almost certainly -- not happening.
ubercow13 3y ago
Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs. If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Right. The pressure of a patent that is due to expire is itself a motivation to make a patentable improvement. And so the cycle repeats. But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design. It's in the nature of things. I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.
- Applejinx 3y ago
  You're not understanding economies of scale. Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses) Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets. And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities). You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs. Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)
dragandj 3y ago
On the other hand, shouldn't "those that produce new technologies" be producing new technologies, instead of milking 60-year old designs? Behringer is essentially producing a copy of Ford-T...
adql 3y ago
If you can't monetize your product within extremely generous patent lifetime giving it more time won't change much. Patents already do more to stifle innovation than to help them. > Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative Okay, what company they actually killed by making a clone ? I haven't heard of single one. I do agree that cloning products currently in production (best recent example being behringer swing) is below belt, but there is NOTHING wrong in resurrecting hardware current manufacturer stopped making, only people "losing" on it are people trying to sell used ones for ungodly amount of money

glimshe 3y ago

Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap). As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countries. The sheer number of decent quality clones - and I say "clone" as a good thing - they produced will be available in the secondary market for decades to come.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
And if Behringer can do it to the competition -- using their expired patents and making a still-competitive product -- then someone else can do it to Behringer.* This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection. * Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.
- x3874 3y ago
  Even Behringer gear gets 'cloned' by the likes of Mooer and Donner these days. It is the natural way / cost of doing business. (rumor has it the Donner B1 is based on designs of B's TD-3) I don't get these sanctimonius types that go like 'oh noes, its the music / gear industry, thats different, ethics, values, full of cool dudes, etc. etc. blaaargh'. Especially mentioning ETHICS in the friggin' MUSIC INDUSTRY is just so hahaha.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    Fundamentally I think the music industry has long-standing patterns to deal with this, anyway. It's hardly new. Almost every contemporary musical instrument company in the world makes a Stratocaster (or sells one made by Aiersi or the other contemporary equivalents of Young Chang and the like). But people still buy Fender kit, including American Stratocasters and custom-shop US Stratocasters.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
They absolutely have invested in R&D. The clones are not trivial component-for-component copies. A lot of old parts aren't available any more and the circuits have to be rebuilt around what's available today. They've added MIDI and USB features. They built their own chip division to resurrect the chips of the 80s. They built products like the DeepMind which is Juno-ish but not really a clone. What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives. There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  Always fun to see Veblen Goods mentioned. There's a running joke in photography that Leicas are a great choice for a dentist.
- notmypenguin 3y ago
  That is a blatant distortion of the truth. They have invested Nothing in New Designs, nothing For The Future, and I find your defense of Behringer utterly disingenuous. Legacy: what legacy of designs, ORIGINAL DESIGNS, has Behringer left us? R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. Name me ONE original Behringer product.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    > R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. The whole tone of your comment is rude, but this in particular is a straw man argument. R&D is just the department (and budget) of a business concerned with product improvement. That absolutely can involve improving on other people's products. And improvements can just be that it is cheaper to produce, or easier to produce at scale. The idea that R&D is a room-full of paid inventors is a myth.
  - klodolph 3y ago
    This is a misuse of the word “disingenuous”. “Disingenuous” is when someone pretends to be stupid, and there’s no valid reason to use that word here. “Disingenuous” is probably the most cliché and tired way to add unnecessary vitriol to a comment on HN.
TylerE 3y ago
Some of that old tech is starting to be very NOT cheap, as the chips haven't been manufactured in 30 years and stockpiles are growing ever slimmer. Germanium stuff for fuzz boxes for instance are now sometimes going for $50+ for a single transistor that would have been 25 cents a few decades ago.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

Can you prove Behringer is actually loss-leading? Selling something that does not make normal profit? If you can prove that, why can't Moog? It is simply not unethical to spot an expired patent and reproduce it at near zero profit with minimal changes, if you can make money at it. This is how patents work. If an idea works, 25 years later someone sells it cheaper, with a few modifications. Almost every product on the market now contains ideas in an expired patent. The pace of innovation means a lot of those patents expired recently. It would be unethical to try to pass it off as identical, but one of the main problems with design is companies not actively adding their own non-essential elements to design. If form follows function, then it cannot be unethical to reproduce the form when you implement the patent. There are (some) laws against making products that don't even make normal profit (by which I mean not paying the entrepreneur) if used anti-competitively. But Moog, Akai etc., would all have the kinds of lawyers who could prove it. So it is probably -- I would say almost certainly -- not happening.

ubercow13 3y ago

Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs. If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
Right. The pressure of a patent that is due to expire is itself a motivation to make a patentable improvement. And so the cycle repeats. But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design. It's in the nature of things. I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.
Applejinx 3y ago
You're not understanding economies of scale. Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses) Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets. And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities). You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs. Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)

dragandj 3y ago

On the other hand, shouldn't "those that produce new technologies" be producing new technologies, instead of milking 60-year old designs? Behringer is essentially producing a copy of Ford-T...

adql 3y ago

If you can't monetize your product within extremely generous patent lifetime giving it more time won't change much. Patents already do more to stifle innovation than to help them. > Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative Okay, what company they actually killed by making a clone ? I haven't heard of single one. I do agree that cloning products currently in production (best recent example being behringer swing) is below belt, but there is NOTHING wrong in resurrecting hardware current manufacturer stopped making, only people "losing" on it are people trying to sell used ones for ungodly amount of money