Behringer - my opinion

This is just my opinion so bear this in mind and it's an opinion which I guess is only relevant should your Behringer gear break. All gear breaks at some stage be it a natural occurring fault or, Oops I've dropped my drink down the back of my amp! or Oops I tripped over the cables and my effects pedal went head over !&*. You know the sort of thing.

As an engineer who fixes music gear day in and day out (except when I'm having a moan online of course) I would like to warn you of the non repair-ability of some brands of gear, in this case Behringer.

I've had several units in lately, one a powered mixer (I'm not going to mention model numbers) Looked pretty nice I thought. It was dead - maybe just a fuse - No! the power supply, a very complicated switch mode affair had failed and gone up in smoke. Once I'd removed the PCB with a struggle I found the under side of the board black with carbon. Not good news, but maybe a power supply 'complete' would be available. It was but at £130.00 plus carriage charges and that was the trade price at cost. The whole thing was only £300 new so was the customer going to have it fixed - No.

The second thing was a midi keyboard with a reported intermittent USB socket. An easy fix? No!
Behringer insist on gluing all the internal plug and sockets together with hot melt glue, to stop them coming apart in transit I guess, so can you easily separate them to gain access - ah no! I couldn't even take the top off this keyboard without cutting the glue away from the sockets and when glue is over PCB and components as well this isn't an easy job. After finally removing the top cover and USB socket PCB, what do I find? Yet another burn up on the underside of the board, taking out various surface mount components. Yet another job the customer didn't want fixed.

This is only two examples of a fair few Behringer units I've had in recently with faults which seem to include disastrous failures, which I can't put down to customer misuse but 'natural' faults.

Ok - maybe this needs qualifying a little. Behringer is mass produced, full featured, pretty good spec - while it's working gear (I use one of their little mixers my self) and I would suspect that their failure rate isn't horrendously high, but should it fail, will it be repairable? Probably not, so bear this in mind when you're looking to part with your hard earned cash. I for one, won't be taking any more Behringer in for repair anymore.

If you're in the UK you can get Behringer Spares from ProlineAudio.co.uk