We live in strange times...Behringer 369

Sounds good on those clips.  Would have wished he dug in a little harder on all the options though.

I experience that with the Behringer pedals. They gave people a taste of the world of 1 use pedals (the tube screamer, ds-1, sd-1, hm2, etc) and aren’t really that much worse than the real things while being better than most boutique pedals made in a garage. They’re just stompboxes that cannot be stomped on for kids who don’t have a hundred bucks for the real thing or the knowledge and 100 bucks to assemble a software solution where there is often only one worth using, eg cytomic the scream for a tube screamer, the sleipner pedal in the softube engl savage amp room for an hm2 to name two that work.

Now for something like a compressor (or synth modules )where the original relied on distortion to hide the action of the compressor and precisely (or imprecisely) binned variable resistors for gain control and precisely binned capacitors and resistors to smooth the gain control (attack and release are just one crazy low pass filter on the dc control path), oh and there is all sorts of hand biasing and trimming internally, there is no good and cheap unless you want a dbx 160, an rnc, an art that will break, or want to pray that a drawmer 241 doesn’t need to be recapped, or that an aphex 651/661’s chips still work because those aphex vcas and dbx/that rms detectors are all gone. Then you have all the really good synths and late real SSL pre china stuff with discontinued chips like the AD and SSM VCAs and rms detectors that will just die, cost a fortune, and your only options are cool audio or an ssi replacement that isn’t a drop in sound wise. Yes gear makers used the prophet parts and yes they can die like the prophets Well time to redesign the gear to repair it like a lot of older products.

All of this precise stuff is better done in digital but good luck teaching a beginner or an audio student unfamiliar with anything but limited pop how to use a Weiss, Massenburg, Tokyo dawn, u-he, or leaping compressor. I mean for even the softube germanium it took me sitting there with plugin doctor and tdr prism on a drum loop to figure out how to set the drive and feedback knobs to be clean, dirty, and to my liking for the material. That’s about as complex as the master volume knobs on a Marshall to figure out but for these compressors that are pretty much applying multiple envelopes and detectors, how can you explain that to someone who doesn’t understand how to set up a Marshall or use an la2a, 1176, or dbx 160?

And I read forum posts every once in a while where these people have no idea how to use something with a couple of knobs and a sweet spot so how do you explain sometime like an ssl bus where it pretty much should only be used in auto and then the attack and ratio switches change the sweet spot or program dependency based on how much gain reduction you want to do and most of the tonal effects are from being outside of the sweet spot screwing up the high end or havint a too bassy mix because the compressor isn’t designed to accommodate that low end with a non-linear timing circuit without a high pass filtered sidechain? Now give someone control of where the compressor speeds up and slows down who has no idea of what they’re hearing or how to fit what they’re hearing into a mix and they cannot know because it’s not all done yet, not being recorded all at once so they cannot hear it raw, they’re listening to a monitor mix designed to flatter them, being recording remotely around the world, etc. no wonder stuff made to work just a little bit with primitive parts worked when the band was all in a room together with an electrical engineer, arranger, and producer who were all mixing it down as they played it. It had to be right and played right because they couldn’t modify it. Now it can be wrong, ie not workable, and we have to hide it or smudge over it or replace it.

A Behringer clone of a noisy stereo compressor that requires precise parts matching to not thump and calibration to not emulsify the audio will not save them.

Here in Cdn that Neve is over $5,000, the Behringer will be under a grand.

I don’t see much point in directly comparing them.

Does the Neve sound 400% better: no, but that’s the costs difference.

For me, the question is only, is the Behringer useful at its price point, so for me it’s competitor is really the UA plug in.

anyway the behringer somehow lowers the cymbals but screws them up worse than the original pre-processed clip. the neve shelves them a bit. his drum loop is already compressed so why would he use a compressor? Holy shit modulation of modulation by products on those cymbals. either way. it's like the dude with the mohawk and punisher tats using compressors on pre-distressored sample loops. Who cares? Whatever will sound best will be the one that screws up the already screwed up sound so that you don't notice it as much.

The comments on youtube are idiotic. These people are losers. Better than plugins? If he wanted to change the sound, something really nasty or cool would change the sound more than what he did, which was barely anything. He just made modulated cymbal hash worse. Softube Germanium for an emulation with the drive and feedback set to darken it, Molot for something to reshape everything controllably and darken it up, Pulsar 1178 would let him apply a ton of different distortions and pick the best one, one of the flexible distortion plugins (decapitator, saturn, sdrr2, rc20, tupe) too.

Am on a FB Mastering Pro, thread,

This was said by a member about the Behringer:

“As many are interested in this apparently. Knobs are heavy to move but easy to recall. Other than that the build quality is great. Especially for the price tag. I do a lot of pro audio DIY and it’s impossible to do this for this price. Will test the sonic qualities tomorrow.“


Pics of guts, show clean build.


I asked if they had the ua plug in and if so, if a few comparisons could be done.

Anybody know if the Arturia plug is different from the UA one?

Cheers,
Geoff

Great hardware always, always blows away great plug-ins. No comparison.

Budget hardware vs great plug-ins …. there’s more of a comparison to be had and not always a clear obvious answer.

The UAD 33609 never sounded very special to my ears, so the Behringer clone isn’t going to have to try too hard to beat it

do you want to distort the sound intentionally or not? Right now digital has more inaudible gain control than analog hardware for the reasons I mentioned above, replaced consoles and tape machines for good reason, and can run ideal electrical models of analog eqs cleaner than any electrical parts if you use double precision operations. Consoles and compressors were made of a bunch of synth parts and ics for accurate control since the 70s. These had distortion, heat, maintenance, and now parts availability issues for many of the ones that were cleaned up a bit. There really isnt a market for ones now built with modern, lower power consumption, so lower heat, ics that aren’t cheaper out. Digital replaced all if their routing and switches and digital consoles are mostly butt live sound things worse than old waves plugins that waves sells solutions to run old waves plugins on them. The same is true with more complex, cleaner compressors. They’re expensive to build, calibrate, and maintain should they drift. Digital allows further and further control. Things like Presswerk, Kotelnikov, and Unisum offer far more control than any analog compressor because they can. The adaptive release in Presswerk calculates the peak, the rms, the peak crest, and then chooses one of 8 releases for the current release value. An SSL bus compressor in comparison picks one of two: 100 ms or so and one that’s over 10 seconds so it is imperative to ride the faders into it to keep the faster envelope on the transients while the other helps you slowly level the music but this also means it can only do certain amounts of gain reduction cleanly at each ratio and attack setting. The more modern vcas and digital compressors offer more control than this but almost all of the more complex vca compressors are gone while the digital ones are still here, including ones that let you pick when the compressor speeds up, fitting the compressor onto the material instead of forcing the material into the compressor.

Amp sims have come a long way. They’re better than amps with crappy modern tubes and even with good tubes, there’s not a lot of difference if you’re feeding them into something colorful. IRs, well what Celestio! did and what Overloud and Softube are doing now is great. There are celestion speakers much worse than the celestion shaper plugin even though the power compression is not there, just compress it later. They’re modeling the craziest stuff to give life back to classic tones that with modern tube quality were a pita to get.

I’m waiting for the £4,999 Neve 88RS console clone.

lol

Running into a lot of component value drift and hysteresis issues on all your Behringer gear are you, Dan?