Yes. Behringer, from the start, was always about copying other brands and offer products to a larger audience through low prices. They used to do so with results of questionable quality... but not anymore. Their output in the synthesizers department has been excellent: low prices, good quality, good sound. They still rip off other brands for 95% of their stuff though... there is absolutely no imagination there. They see what works well in the market, come with a much cheaper version with a different (or not so much) design and it's done. Latest release, a Moog rip-off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LADPPcaN0
I kind of wonder if this was an intentional decision for Behringer or if Moog trademarked their interface and thus forced Behringer to do something different?
Some of the very old synths that Behringer has been cloning were probably protected by utility patents that covered the electrical circuits, but those have long expired, and I think trademarks become unenforceable if your aren't actively selling a product that uses it anymore. I don't have any moral objection to cloning the old synths either -- our laws have mechanisms to grant inventors exclusive use of their ideas for a limited time, but when that expires it's part of the commons. That's a good thing. I do think it's gross though to clone a popular recent synth just because you can and because the original designer didn't file the right paperwork to stop other people from doing that.
There's a continuous flamewar on /r/synthesizers between the people who think Behringer is a detestable parasite and the people who think they're making high-quality analog synthesizers available to the masses in a way that they never have before. I think both camps are right to a degree. I will defend Behringer's right to use the stuff that's clearly in the public domain, but I also think they have no class. They do things that damage their reputation even when it wouldn't have required much effort not to.
(I'm not an IP lawyer, so don't take this as expert commentary.)
Right -- same as 7Artisans / TTArtisan lenses. Genuinely impressive, affordable products, combined with a notable and surprising lack of self-respect where external design is concerned. At some level a lens barrel is a lens barrel, and the "big" brands are converging in their design language anyway as is normal, but the sooner these cheaper brands develop a consistent design language, the better.
I’m glad Behringer made them look completely different from the originals, though I’m still not quite sure how I feel about them cloning synths that have been on the market less than a decade (as opposed to their typical cloning of 30+ year-old synths). The compact format and addition of MIDI are meaningful changes, at least, and there is something to be said for making the entire trio accessible for about the price of one of the Moogs.
moog is selling very generic circuits, there's no intellectual property at stake, so rip off is I think is quite an exaggeration. The original moog pioneered the space, in less than two decades lost popularity in the face of newer ideas from competitors, and sold out to a big company that milked the brand name for awhile and also wanted to shut it down. The original founder got the rights back and basically pulled a Harley Davidson, made a nostalgic brand with premium pricing, "made in USA", employee ownership, etc.
There's a huge industry of competing synths, and moog's strategy of sitting on big fat brand margins gave them a cushion to old school, but also kept their nice sounding products out of the hands of young musicians. Young musicians getting started are the quintessential "starving artists". Behringer said "hey, these are generic circuits (not much more complicated than logic gates) and tons of people who can't afford them would like to use them. Modern scaled factory manufacture can bring them to the masses" and as a result they are very popular.
laying out the knobs in similar order? I mean, it's File-Edit-View and Cut-Copy-Paste, and laid out like the 6 strings of a guitar...
moog invented the ladder filter, it was amazing and unique, they patented it and enforced the patent. That was 50 years ago, the patent has expired.
This is a bit condescending. There’s much more nuance, variation, experimentation in synthesizer interfaces then what your comment suggests.
We are basically talking about the user interface, not the underlying synthesis engine/implementation. There is quite a bit of variety among synth interfaces that otherwise follow the standard subtractive synth mechanism of producing sound.
For a trivial example, is it a problem if a silverware company is selling spoons, forks and knives that look like all other spoons, forks and knives? With the intellectual property rights gone, many companies create a business around being efficient at production, distribution and marketing, which are not easy things to be good at!
Another example... We don't need a social media crypto cloud document editor, we need great, inexpensive, fast, polished, standard document editors.
Let's end this idea that everybody needs to be always imagining new things. Innovation is obviously good, but excelling at building things that leverage humanity's collective, public-domain intellectual property is also great.
Behringer are hit and miss on this. They killed it with their Minimoog clones - very, very close to the real hardware - but not so much with some of their later efforts.
I have their Pro-One and their K2 and both lack the character and warmth of the originals. They sound like clones.
The P800, Solina and Kat all seem very good though.
People who accuse Behringer of cloning are missing the point.
They used to literally copy circuit traces and component BOMs. That's just outright theft. But they don't do that now.
The recent synths are clones in name only. They keep the panel graphics and functions but reimplement updates of the original circuits with SMD parts on new board layouts using a new industrial supply chain.
They have a deliberate policy of building reusable platforms so the development costs can be spread across multiple products.
All of that is innovative, and there's a lot more involved than copying an old circuit.
There is a psychopathic edge - like cloning MI's Plaits, which many suspect helped push Émilie out of the business, to everyone's loss. But it's not necessarily more psychopathic than (say) Roland's approach, which is to keep reselling versions of the same technology - often with the same samples - over and over at cash-grab prices for a couple of decades.
No they're not... at least on the clones I have, they nailed it. And yes I have the originals.
It's like people who say that Arturia's VSTs are exactly like the real thing - to which I can only say "Huh???"
Thats quite some... BS. Gillet intented to exit the audio hardware industry in search of different, greener pastures already way before Brains was released. Also MI code is public, so 'cloning' is a stretch. MI designs were and are being produced by multiple shops.
Btw: i hope not just a handful people know the story about Dave Smith fucking over Dave Rossum by one-sidedly deciding to stop payments for E-MUs licensed poly keybed tech:
"But then Sequential Circuits had decided they were no longer going to pay us royalties for the Prophet 5. We called our lawyers, and though we would probably win a lawsuit against them, it would be expensive. The Audity would take several years to produce the kind of revenue we needed for that – could we come up with another product quickly? The Emulator was about to be born."
EMU designed and patented a digitally scanned polyphonic keyboard that was licensed by both Oberheim for the Oberheim 4-Voice and 8-Voice synthesizers and by Sequential Circuits for the Prophet 5.
Source: https://www.amazona.de/interview-dave-rossum-e-mu-part-two-e...
Another thing is that Boog Moog didn't "invent the Theremin or so", he got a foothold by selling (dare to say 'unlicensed'?) kits based on another dudes' invention. Has he ever knowingly paid tribute to Lew Thermen?
I know the designs are open source and produced elsewhere, but it's not unreasonable to wonder if Brains was what finally pushed her over the edge.
https://www.gearnews.com/mutable-instruments-no-new-modules-...
Yes, Gillet has a history announcing ceasing development and production. Just read 'Have we been here before?', and also the last comment.
I bet people already asked Gillet directly if B's announcement contributed. I don't know, a) i don't care about vendor / personality cults, and b) their forums are gone.
Peter Van Hoesen has a really good review on YT about one of their Moog clones. He knows his shit and concludes it's overall pretty great.
I wonder who at Behringer was behind this crazy pivot. Can't recall seeing anything like it in any other industry.
The one I heard (and love because it's true) is that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off.
And for the ones still naive to not really understand what I mean: "Costs of labor", "handling fees", and similar line items in an invoice are merely an inverse reflection of how generous the guy billing you feels at that moment.
I've seen some pretty nasty stuff done in order to maximize profit... I don't want to be negative but there is a reason why these jobs attract a certain... profile... or if you can't "adapt" quickly, you're done.
Of course some small shops still exist when it comes to synths, especially in Europe where one manufacturer can make direct deals with European retailers, that's why the Eurorack module format is a thing. But these aren't "maximizing their profit". It's a scene that has loyal customers that are ready to pay a bit more for ethical purposes.
It's also a scene that has been using crowdfunding forever, before Kickstarter even existed.
Does the market tend to find "inefficient" areas and someone comes in and "maximize efficiency"? I think Behringer is trying to vacuum all revenue in that space...