Behinger now has competition: Phonic

[skippy]

I just saw a most amusing family of items at my local Mars Music store this evening. They have apparently picked up a new line of ultra-ultra-low-cost mixing boards made by a company called "Phonic Performance Engineering", and are offering them at apallingly low prices.

For those of you who are familiar with the Mackie-Behringer litigation, you'll get a huge laugh out of these. Mackie successfully sued Behringer for knocking off their products- well, it would appear that Phonic has decided to knock off Behringer in turn! Check it out: http://www.phonic.com, or on the floor at your nearest Mars.

The designs are unbelieveably similar, and the Phonic prices are about 10% lower than the equivalent Behringer items. Phonic appears to be Taiwanese (Formosa, to be exact), so this should get really interesting. Many of the units are exactly *identical* in layout detail to the Behringer equivalents.

I didn't get a chance to audition these. They weren't powered up, and I wasn't interested enough in them to actually press the subject. However, if you are broke enough not to care about knockoffs, these might possibly be worth looking into (as long as you approach them with ears wide open!). Caveat emptor, for _sure_. And if you are one of the folks who just flat loathes Behringer on general principles, this will give you a whole new reason to laugh at them- and maybe somebody new to loathe. Looks like these may have been available in Europe for some time, according to the web site. I suppose that I should acknowledge that there's some chance that these are actually licensed Behringer designs, or that the similarities are just a coincidence. But somehow I doubt it...

In Mars coverage areas, the Behringer knockoffs are probably going to lose significant market share to the Phonic knockoff-knockoffs on price alone, even if the latter units actually suck unspeakably. How hilarious is *that*? What goes around, comes around, no?

[Blue Bear Sound]

Well... nice to see Behringer get the same slap in the face back that they tried to do to Mackie!

...but the sad thing is now there is more garbage gear on the market to fool the novice recordist into thinking is "good enough".

Bruce

[Track Rat]

This is interesting. How does puke compete with vomit?

[Blue Bear Sound]

Run a U87 thru the puke's pre, you notice a harsh tone with a somewhat acidic quality. Run the Neumann thru the vomit and it has an acidic tone with a harsh quality!

[Track Rat]

I see.........

[Blue Bear Sound]

[ditnoj]

Amen on the comment about "deceived novices". I was about to suggest a Behringer mixer and some other stuff for a studio I'm going to be involved in until I got "educated" thanks to the posts on this board. I'm glad the folks didn't have the money "ready to spend" yet!

It is now (and has been for a bit) my practice to always check out the buzz on whatever here on the board before buying to at least see if folk have had problems with the item or not.

D out ITNOJ