Behringer is at it again...

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skippy

skippy

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Oh, well- and this time they've decided to knock off one of my favorite Mom and Pop vendors- Ebtech, the guys who do the Hum Eliminator isolation transformer products. Just noticed this today...

Compare, if you will, the following two products: the Ebtech Swizz Army Cable Tester (available since 1997, made in the USA, patents pending), and the Behringer CT100, just introduced in the last 6 months:

http://www.swizzarmy.com/swizzdes.htm
http://www.behringer.com/02_products/prodindex.cfm?id=CT100&lang=eng

The CT100 lists itself as "Conceived and designed in Germany, and manufactured in China under the Behringer Management System."

The two products are absolutely identical... but the Swizz Army is $149, and the Behringer is $59. It's amazing how cheaply you can make things when you don't have to employ people to design them, isn't it?

Some people will find that to be an excellent bargain, and will buy the CT100 without a second thought. Be my guest, of course- that's what the free market is all about. But for those of you who have always wondered why some of us had concerns over Behringer's business ethics, here's a nicely documented *and current* example. It would appear that they have not changed their business tactics at all. Wonder when Ebtech will file suit? They probably can't even afford to.

That leaves a very bad taste in my mouth, I'm afraid. Yes, I do own a number of Behringer products- but from this point forward, the number will be decreasing as I replace those with others.
 
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Heh! They even copied the product "features" page almost verbetim!

Yeah, I will never spend money on a Behringer product again. I dig my Composer (old style), and the old style MultiGate was a very nice piece too, but, it is getting sort of rediculous how they copy everybodies design to a T. Must be some interesting legal preceedings in Germany!

Eddie
 
Oh c'mon.......... you call THAT copying????

The color, and the labels are totally different.... ok... MAYBE the knobs are identical, the LEDs are labelled the same, the connectors are located in the same position, and even the fascia layout is identical, but c'mon - what does THAT prove??? :eek: :eek: :eek: ;)


Yikes...

...that business ethic alone would be enough to make me steer clear - but even if I was tempted, their general sonic sloppiness ensures I don't buy their crap... they're right down there with Rolls as far as I'm concerned...!!!


Bruce
 
They're the Milli Vanilli of equipment.
 
I bought a Behringer 802A Eurorack mixer a long time ago,
before finding out that it's a ripoff/knockoff of the Mackie 1202.
God forbid if (or when!) it breaks down as it's the "Anti-Hyatt"
of customer service! Don't really have the heart to unload it
on some unsuspecting soul on e-bay though....
 
Well, I don't know what to think... Or perhaps I do think that $59 is a more resonable price than $149 for a cable tester. With the risk of being crucified, and perhaps rightly so, I venture to say that Behringer has a function to fill. Had the original product been more reasonably priced, Behringer wouldn't have had any profits to make knocking it off. And I don't think that they have just ripped off the schematics and sent them to china. Because its simply too simple a product to design yourself. So what they have stolen is the idea, and patenting that idea shouldn't be possible. Ebtech knows this and knows that sooner or later someone more experienced in mass production is going to knock it off. And therefore they decided to try and make as much money as they could until that happended, instead of charging a reasonable price from the beginning. Probably they won't even try to match Behringers price, but will hope that some people will still buy their overpriced stuff out of pity.
Of course my experience in the mass production of consumer electronics is quite limited, so I would really listen more to what mister Hyatt has to say. :D
 
Sorry dude,
You're talking complete rubish. Just so you know that I'm not naturally biased against German products or lower prices - I'm a German Economist.

What Behringer does is not just disgusting, it destroys markets. It doesn't matter if a company sells a product for too high a price or not. I'm sure Mackie does and so do many other companies in such segmented markets as proaudio. Competition is a great thing and I love to see prices go down. However, if this is achieved by stealing then this will probably do more bad than good. It takes away the incentive for small companies to develop new products in the first place. Mmany people here have probably thought about creating and marketing a new product but never did so. Why? Because if the product stinks it won't sell (time and investments lost) ... but if it rocks, it will be copied by companies like Behringer in no time.
You're happy you're getting this Cable tester for so cheap from Behringer? But you don't realize how many great products you never got because people shyed away from producing them in the first place.

At the same time, it is good and necessary that companies learn from each other's technological advances. So, there's no black and white. In the case of this Cable tester, however, it's embarrassingly obvious that Behringer did not just adopt the idea (which I would think would have been a legitimate action in our competitive market) but actually copied it .... and that's an economic NONO.
 
Well, you do have a point. And it seems i cannot even agree with myself within the above post. :) However I still don't think it is quite so simple as just saying that Behringer are thieves and should be promptly darned to heck.
 
FWIW, I agree with BasPer's original statement:

Swizzarmy's product is GROSSLY overpriced for its function, and there is NO WAY I would ever have bought a $180 cable tester.

C'mon already. Let's get real. For all we know, Behringer licensed that design from Swizzarmy, and Swizzarmy was more than happy to collect those fees because their sales were hopelessly sluggish - because they priced themselves out of the market.
 
If Behringer paid for a license on the design thingswould look a lot different. I don't like how much bad mouthing Behringer gets on bbs but I do see where it might be coming from. I'm sure their products are worse than their ads make them out to be --- but they're most certainly better than what people here say about them.

Behringer might not be a full-fledged thief ... but certainly a full-fledged idiot. Why be so blatant about a copied design?

Griff, who cares whether or not you would have bought the product at $180. I wouldn't either. But you'er still missing the point. If you wrote a movie script and tried to sell it for a million people might not buy it. But would you think it's fair if somebody made a sercet copy and then sold your idea for $1000? A grand might have been the right price from the start but that doesn't make the stealing right, does it?

I don't think Behringer is a complete thief, but a copied design makes a product very suspect as a whole. They might have done the engineering themselves but it's harder now to believe they did.
 
mcr said:
If Behringer paid for a license on the design thingswould look a lot different. I don't like how much bad mouthing Behringer gets on bbs but I do see where it might be coming from. I'm sure their products are worse than their ads make them out to be --- but they're most certainly better than what people here say about them.

Behringer might not be a full-fledged thief ... but certainly a full-fledged idiot. Why be so blatant about a copied design?

Griff, who cares whether or not you would have bought the product at $180. I wouldn't either. But you'er still missing the point. If you wrote a movie script and tried to sell it for a million people might not buy it. But would you think it's fair if somebody made a sercet copy and then sold your idea for $1000? A grand might have been the right price from the start but that doesn't make the stealing right, does it?

I don't think Behringer is a complete thief, but a copied design makes a product very suspect as a whole. They might have done the engineering themselves but it's harder now to believe they did.
Click to expand...

I agree that if they stole the design, they're rotten theives. However, the point remains that we don't know that they stole it. Fact is, we'd all still be on Macs if IBM hadn't licensed out the design for the PC and had a mountain of other companies release significantly cheaper versions. No one called them thieves, because that licensing was public - but there is a lot of licensing that goes on behind closed doors. Especially between small companies like swizzarmy and big huge manufacturing conglomerates like Behringer.

My inclination is to believe that they very much did license this design - simply because it's a carbon copy with Behringer markings. This would be a major league international intellectual property issue if they didn't. It's too much of a clone.

Your illustration about the movie script is a bit overdramatized, but the point is certainly salient.
 
Given that one of their first mixer products was a direct knockoff of the Mackie 1202 (identical right down to the PC board layout, I believe), and that that led to *protracted* legal action and an out-of-court (but nonpublic) settlement: I think that we have ample reason to be suspicious. They HAVE done this before, and I'm inclined to distrust them in this matter in the absence of claims to the contrary.

I think that they are simply knocking off smaller companies with less resources to fight them these days. The SHARC DSP1000 is pretty much a knockoff of the Sabine FBX, and this tester is a direct knockoff of the Ebtech. I doubt that either company has the resources to fight a "giant manufacturing conglomerate".

If they licensed the design from Ebtech, I doubt that they'd have the balls to say "conceived and designed in Germany", when it was actually conceived and designed in Illinois. (;-) If you've licensed someone else's intellectual property, and you have a well-documented history in the marketplace of simply stealing it, don't you think it would make good marketing sense to say "We licensed this this time- doesn't that make us good guys now?" in your advertising materials, or in the spec sheets, or _somewhere_ in the collateral?

Yes: to me they are guilty until proven innocent. I'll call Ebtech and ask them, and post back here. If they licensed it, I'll *happily* eat crow. You'll all be the first to know!

Anyway, believe what you like, and buy what you like: but ther absolutely are products that have never, and will never, see the light of day because of these issues. There's no money to be made in pro audio, and most engineers don't care to work for free...
 
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skippy said:
Anyway, believe what you like, and buy what you like: but ther absolutely are products that have never, and will never, see the light of day because of these issues. There's no money to be made in pro audio, and most engineers don't care to work for free...
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Believe me. I'm not a Behringer fanatic. I've got an Autocom 1200 that works spectacularly well, and I bought it used for $90. Outside of that, I know where to go for the real quality, and it ain't to Germany.
 
Just spoke with Bll Wenzloff at Ebtech: 847-639-4646.

He confirmed that there is no licensing agreement in place, and that the Behinger product is an unauthorized, completely identical, reverse-engineered duplication of their product, right down to the dimensions of the sheet metal and the circuitry inside. A knockoff. In short, this *is* an outright theft of a product that had been in the marketplace for many years.

He also confirmed that they have decided not to persue legal action at this time, primarily because of resource constraints and secondarily because of the public perception that "whoever files the suit must be the bad guy". They are just going to let the marketplace decide, which is to say that they've basically written it off: they can't build it as cheaply in Illinois as Behringer can in China.

Feel free to call and talk to him about this. Ebtech have decided not to be agressively public about this, but simply to inform people of the truth of the matter when they call in and ask. They are a small company, Behringer is huge: that fight was over before it started.

I asked his permission to post this material before writing this, so this is all independently verifiable. But it does appear as if my concerns above are justified. Behringer is still knocking off other manufacturers' products: they are now just picking on the *little guys* who probably won't fight back.
 
That does it for me. I rejoice in a good bargain (as everyone here knows), but not theft. I had my eye on several Behringer pieces (especially after reading good things here about a few of them), but all considerations are now permanently off the table.

[I've edited out my middle paragraph, which I should not have stated publicly, but I will keep my word on this matter, and then some.]

Thank you, Skippy, for bringing this to everone's attention.

Sincerely,

Mark H.
 
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skippy said:
Just spoke with Bll Wenzloff at Ebtech: 847-639-4646.

He confirmed that there is no licensing agreement in place, and that the Behinger product is an unauthorized, completely identical, reverse-engineered duplication of their product, right down to the dimensions of the sheet metal and the circuitry inside. A knockoff. In short, this *is* an outright theft of a product that had been in the marketplace for many years.

He also confirmed that they have decided not to persue legal action at this time, primarily because of resource constraints and secondarily because of the public perception that "whoever files the suit must be the bad guy". They are just going to let the marketplace decide, which is to say that they've basically written it off: they can't build it as cheaply in Illinois as Behringer can in China.

Feel free to call and talk to him about this. Ebtech have decided not to be agressively public about this, but simply to inform people of the truth of the matter when they call in and ask. They are a small company, Behringer is huge: that fight was over before it started.

I asked his permission to post this material before writing this, so this is all independently verifiable. But it does appear as if my concerns above are justified. Behringer is still knocking off other manufacturers' products: they are now just picking on the *little guys* who probably won't fight back.
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That is just fucking sad.

I'm finished with Behringer. Deal or no deal, they'll not get any of my money. Nor will they get the money of my business associates, both studio and musician alike, because this is one that I'll be talking about any time Behringer comes up in conversation.

This just sucks.
 
Unfortunately, Skippy is correct. Small companies like Ebtech and myself just can't afford the resources to stop these pirates from doing what they do. Had Behringer made it look a bit different, changed a few parts and values, then we could not really say or do anything. But an exact copy is a real crime, and it is a shame that we are helpless to do anything about it. All we can do is not buy them.

I will add that DBX bascially copied the ART Tube MP. They did change some parts, but the look is almost the same. I would have preferred DBX doing a different shape on their new small preamp, but it seems that it did not stop DBX from some copying.

Alan Hyatt
PMI Audio Group
 
We are all thieves to some extent, there arent too many original ideas out there and cable testors are hardly high tech. But they could have at least gone to the effort to disguise it somewhat. At least change the fonts and graphics. How lazy can you be? I guess they actually want people to confuse the two products.
 
I once wrote a song in G-Major ... and a friend took the idea and wrote his own song in G-Major. Bastard :(

jk ...

It seems to be the sad truth that companies steal. In general, I don't bother thinking about that. I want to buy a company's products in good faith and use the stuff. Where they got their technology from shouldn't really be my business. That's what patent laws are there for ... BUT, if the sad truth smacks me in the face as Behringer does with this product, there's no way I can buy it.

Four years ago, I dated a girl from NY whose father turned out to be the inventor of the MRI. The sad story I had to learn there was that he had invented the technology and built the first machine in 1978 ... but as obvious as his patents were, GE, Hitachi, Siemens ... all stole his technology. Wasn't exactly proud of my Siemens job when I heard that story for the first time.
Anyways, the reason why I'm telling this story is that it's part of life - for better and for worse. You got your relatively cheap MRI scans over the last 15 years because the big companies exploited somebody else's idea. Luckily in his case, at leastthe scientific community honors his achievement (+ he got the national medal of technology a.o.) but the largest part of this multi-billion dollar cake accrue to the MNCs. It's good, on some weird level, but it sucks.

I don't care if they change the design and only steal the interior. All that does is soothe my conscience. Yet, it's not so bad at times to have enough information to know what's going on - and to make the "right" choice, which I certainly will.

mcr

p.s: I've been happily married to that "girl" for 7 months now :)
 
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