Holy crap! Will e-bay ever be the same again?

[rockgardenlove]

Hey, but at least Boss/Rolant invented the pedals, and in the cases where they didn't they at least used unique casings!  Behringer is both stealing the circuit, the boxes, and exploiting cheap Asian labor. 

[Processaurus]

There's a Hyper Fuzz  HF-2 clone too, which poetically in turn was supposedly a clone of the univox superfuzz.

Whats odd is the choices in clones they're releasing is what pedal connoisseurs, the people who know way too much about pedals, would want, but not only is that a really tiny market, but probably the most biased against plastic Chinese knockoffs.  Is the market then pedal connoisseurs who lost all their money, and no longer believe in the mojo of the originals?  Will there be a  Behringer Band-o-matic and Behringer Symphonic Percolator?  Fuzz Sweatshop?

I'll probably get the DC-2  though .  Though the fact a nimble fingered elf in Malaysia making $1.50 an hour can knock out what I don't have the courage to attempt myself is a little unnerving.

[calculating_infinity]

Is the market then pedal connoisseurs who lost all their money, and no longer believe in the mojo of the originals? 

This made me laugh.     Seriously though rockgardenlove I can totally understand where you are coming from.  I cant justify buying a VB-2 for 200+ though.  I'd rather have a clone of my dm-2 to try and tinker with first than to just jump in on my original dm-2.  Plus if its plastic it will be much easier to cut and drill. 

-Jonathan

[Cliff Schecht]

There's a Hyper Fuzz  HF-2 clone too, which poetically in turn was supposedly a clone of the univox superfuzz.

Whats odd is the choices in clones they're releasing is what pedal connoisseurs, the people who know way too much about pedals, would want, but not only is that a really tiny market, but probably the most biased against plastic Chinese knockoffs.  Is the market then pedal connoisseurs who lost all their money, and no longer believe in the mojo of the originals?  Will there be a  Behringer Band-o-matic and Behringer Symphonic Percolator?  Fuzz Sweatshop?

I'll probably get the DC-2  though .  Though the fact a nimble fingered elf in Malaysia making $1.50 an hour can knock out what I don't have the courage to attempt myself is a little unnerving.

Could you post a schematic of that DC-2? I had it before I formatted  . Unless I'm just really confused, the DC-2 wasn't the most complicated pedal out there (but not too easy either ).

[brett]

The web site says:

Products mentioned herein are exclusively BEHRINGER products and are not in any way associated with and have not been approved, licensed, sponsored, endorsed, designed or manufactured (or anything else for that matter!) by anyone other than BEHRINGER.

So it seems that the inspiration for these was all their own.     They must have sat in a dark room, far away from any schematics... 

[gez]

How much sympathy can we be expected to give to Boss and company when their products get copied?

I can't feel sorry for western companies whose wealth has been built on exploitation.  Not many years ago, western companies exploited Chinese labour and resources with abandon, and to some degree this exploitation continues today.  Is Boss paying its Taiwanese workers a western wage?  Do pigs fly?  If Behringer is copying Boss pedals, it isn't right, and two wrongs don't make a right, but it kind of restores balance to the universe.

Well, it's companies like Boss who've invested time & money in R&D and who've set the standards over the years, so although I don't feel sorry for them I do feel some respect for them - there are a lot of clones based on their original products and we've all benefited from their work.

As far as exploitation goes, they're not exactly the pharmaceutical industry and are pretty innocuous in that respect.  As I've pointed out before, all Western countries have gone through periods of development - the UK had its in the 19th century - where workers get shafted, but ultimately the economy grows and eventually  that wealth trickles down to the poorest in society.  It's easy to forget history, for us (relatively) privileged westerners to forget that we went through the same thing.  don't know about Boss, but these days quite a number of firms based in Asia pay above the average wage for the area...if they didn't, they wouldn't attract workers. 

Anyway, perhaps we should move this to the Lounge Brett. 

[Bore-inger]

this ring a bell?

[darron]

i have a behringer am100. i'm very disappointed with the quality of it. though at $20AU wholesale it's about what you'd expect for what you paid. it's the acoustic modeler. i like what it does, but the quality is poor. the bypass adds too much noise. the effect is VERY, VERY hissy. it MIGHT be better if i shielded it? still, i'd rather the boss. especially to take on tour....

[scaesic]

what i'm worried about is they're releasing a tu300 at namm, i just bought a tu100...

now why are they re-releasing a new version of a tuner pedal.......

[george]

the effect is VERY, VERY hissy. it MIGHT be better if i shielded it?

no, shielding only stops outside interference eg AC hum.

Hiss comes from the components in the circuit itself.  I've got the Behringer graphic eq, it hisses like a snake ....

[MKB]

Behringer has some strange products.  I have a V-Amp2 and an X V-Amp (please don't laugh), and they would be useful products if they weren't so poorly engineered.  With the V-Amp, if you plug the power supply into the wall before you plug the supply into the V-Amp, it scrambles the memory.  But then again, the internal battery dies every few months and you lose all your presets.  And my X V-amp died awhile back, don't know why.  They seem to get the V-Amps 90% of the way there, then drop the ball on some small engineering item that should have been easy to avoid.

But OTOH, we were in a studio last week recording, sitting on top of the $500K 60 channel Neve board was one of those silver Behringer direct boxes.  The only direct boxes I saw in the place were the cheap Behringer ones.  Looked a bit out of place beside the Pro Tools rig.  So maybe you have to try their stuff out to see if it is a diamond or a turd.  It is a huge shame they went surface mount on the pedals, it would be great if you could get a cheap pedal to modify.  I swapped an op amp in my Bad Monkey awhile back and it was NOT easy...

[Mark Hammer]

I have the Behringer AC-2 clone.  It is hissy but not hummy.  The hiss likely stems from use of TL064 quad opamps, which trade off current consumption for noise specs.  Personally, in this era of pedalboards and power supplies (which Behringer appears to be joining), I think I'd rather have less noise than longer battery life.  True, it has a plastic case, but then so does my MXR Commande Flanger, and it's a decent quiet pedal that takes loads of physical abuse, as do all my own DIY pedals in plastic cases.

I posted this thread not so much out of outrage about Behringer taking the easy route and exploiting the R&D and track record of other companies (and they do deserve a bit of a slap on the wrists for that), but rather because of the implications - as conveyed in the heading - for the resale market on discontinued Boss and other pedals, as well as the market value of vintage reissues.

Some 20 years ago, when I got my first Radio Shack Color Computer and joined a users group, I noticed an interesting phenomenon.  Initially, when there were few software choices available, members would pay full retail price for the software, and *commit* to it.  As the choices available started to pile up, I noticed a shift towards people stockpiling pirated software.  The general pattern seemed to be that they couldn't really commit to a single application for any given use (e.g., graphics or word processing), and since they didn't really know if they really needed the other available packages, they weren't going to pay retail price for them, but were nonetheless going to score a "backup" copy from someone and have them around just in case it turned out that package X couldn't do something that package Y could.  Typically, they never exploited all the features of any single package nor learned any single package expertly enough to do so, so they were basically running around like headless chickens amassing more and more software.

I mention this because as consumer awareness of the various legendary 1, 2, 3, and 4-knob wonders grows disproportionately to the wallet, I see a similar pattern emerging.  You have people thinking "Geez, I wish I had one of those, and one of those and one of those....AND one of those.  But I could never afford them."  Behringer seems to have simply decided to climb on the back of the acquisitiveness pony and taken it for a ride.  I won't paint them as the super villain here, because Danelectro has made low-cost repros of several vintage pedals (Pepperoni Phaser, French Toast Octave, Rocky Road Univibe clone, etc), and they were lauded for making halfway decent pedals affordable, all without necessarily making explicit what it was they were cloning.  Behringer's crime seems to have been to push the envelope a bit further by virtue of their unabashed copy of the cosmetic aspects of other companies' products - a bit like selling "Ralex" watches and "Guchi" bags on the street.

What seems to distinguish the Danelectro and Behringer approaches is not only the packaging aspect, but the fact that while Danelectro has made a point of basically only having one of any single type of pedal (with the exception of several different distortions...but then everyone does that because they think of overdrive as a different "effect" than fuzz) in each of their series or price ranges, and has even developed a number of original products, Behringer's approach seems to be that of "Here's every single commercially available chorus pedal you ever set eyes on and wanted", or "Here's every single vintage delay pedal you ever wanted".  Like I say, their modus operandi is to ride our acquisitiveness motivation for as far as it can take them.

Back to the software thing for a moment.  If I could commit to a vibrato pedals and it became as regular and fundamental a part of my sound as my bridge pickup is, then I would spring for a vintage one.  But, like my old software hoarding buddies who would amass things largely because they thought they might want it (even though they didn't really know for certain), I imagine that a lot of folks who could not see many of these effects being as basic as their bridge pickup will likely buy these pedals, just to have it around, and because the cost of doing so is not that high.

My gut sense is that the impact on e-bay and the vintage market could go either way.  On the one hand, if the number of takers for a "real" DC-2 at $300 diminishes because people bought the Behringer clone, then maybe that DC-2 drops to $250. On the other hand, if the clone is easily differentiable from the original by virtue of noise or some other critical to semi-critical features, then the original's status may well increase and market value ascend.  For that matter, there may well be NO appreciable difference in performance between the two, but mojo may drive the price up.  Either way, e-bay and the vintage pedal market may well never be the same again. 

And while we're busy making bold predictions here, it may also become quite "normal" for kids starting out to have fairly substantial pedalboards if  a couple of hundred bucks can buy them a half dozen of these puppies.  Who knows.  Dean, maybe the real market for your switcher is the Behringer-buying crowd.

[A.S.P.]

clone`d thread: 

[MikeH]

I don't think I've ever tried out a berringer effect and afterward not thought to myself, "Man, what a piece of garbage".   Granted I haven't tried them all, but right now they got about an 0 and 10 record going with me.

[Steben]

I don't think I've ever tried out a berringer effect and afterward not thought to myself, "Man, what a piece of garbage".

Cool.

[Rafa]

Ive played through some beringher amps and those amps really suck. They sound bad, but the quality of the amp (mainly the knobs panel)is even worse. Personally I doubt that a Big muff clone by beringher could sound close to the original.
The only  beringher effects processor Ive played were the ones included in amps which also werent good at all.
Rafa

[StephenGiles]

But  - no barberpole phasing - they've failed!!!

[Skreddy]

Behringer is exploiting Chinese labor too; they're just doing so with other people's intellectual capital.  Not sure how this restores any balance, since both sins fall on the same side of the scale.  Edit: oops, I missed page 2's first comment, which is the same thing.  Carry on!

[StephenGiles]

Ummm China, which has just shot a 4 feet wide satelite out of space, I don't think we need worry about China, I should worry more about the US government's exploitation of the world in general, to say nothing of the Injuns!

[joelap]

Everyone should relax and Lets all talk good about these pedals for a couple months.  LEt everyone think they blow away our vintage and even (dare I say) the pedals we have cloned ourselves of the originals.  Then when everyone leaves the vintage market, we all hop on the bay and in one week take all the vintage goods for ourselves!



In all seriousness, I'd have to try these guys out for myself.  Behringer products arent the most structurally sound IME, and I have heard from numerous sources their stuff tends to be a bit noisy.  We'll all just have to wait and see.  I know I wouldnt object to buying one of these if they sound good and are close to the originals, especially if the prices are low!