Czar.... let me tell you a secret "quality is all relative...."
Now that you know the secret - I'll tell you what it means... this secret is why so many people have so many different opinions on gear, and why there are so many differing opinions on the SAME gear!
Whether gear is a "quality piece" or not is going to depend entirely on the level of gear it is surrounded with.
Here's an example...
Take a kid with a PortaStudio, and no other gear.... he messes with it for a while, gets some stuff down, but of course it doesn't sound anything like the commercial CDs sound he wants to emulate. So he decides he probably needs some effects... he gets some cheap-ass Zoom or something like that. He plugs it in, messes with it and at that point, ask him if it's a quality unit and he'll say ABSOLUTELY... Why? because it sounds "different" and better than what he had before....
Well... duh... Bruce - anybody knows that - what's your point?
Here - Now that same kid buys a Lexicon reverb (say
a PCM81) that costs 10 times as much as his entire recording rig, because his studio pro friend recommended it (good choice, actually!).
He plugs it in, and gets completely pissed because he just wasted his life's savings on a effect unit, that compared to the Zoom, is only marginally better! HUH??? Of course, the Lexi is WAY better than the Zoom (again, duh!) - but within the context of using the 2 devices with his PortaStudio that is already sonically limited, he did not have a chain signal that would allow the Lexi's advantages to be heard.
Obviously, that's an extreme case, but it explains my point clearly.... it's not enough to ask someone for their opinion - when you get their opinion, you have to know something about the context in which they say it.
I generally hate Behringer stuff, but I have 2 pieces which find use in my studio... the Behringer Virtualizer - reverbs are pretty bad, but the delays are useful - and for $100 bucks you get a vocoder, which is a cool lo-fi effect. Within my control room, I find it very easy to hear the lack of quality in the Behringer's reverb compared to my Lexicons or even the Rocktron LTD (which is actually an amazing sounding unit that you can score at a good price used). The other piece is a 2-channel noise gate - hey it's a noise gate - it does what it needs to do!
SO....... to tie this all in with what you're asking.... the bottom line is when dealing with low-end or mid-end gear, only you will be able to judge the quality for yourself, since the judgement will depend on your skill and the level of gear you're going to be using with it.
You will play it safe by buying the expensive stuff (since, you've taken the mediocrity of the gear out of the equation), but whether you hear enough difference because of your rig's limitations to justify the cost is another story.
Bottom-line --- this post is a really long-winded way of saying "it depends!"
YMMV.........
Bruce
PS - a patchbay is an excellent idea once you get more than 1 or 2 pieces of outboard gear - it lets you waste less time behind your console doing rewiring, and spend more time in front of it making music.
