Behringer evolved from a "cheap unusable shit" to very solid gear and a company that listens to their users.
If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise. That's not easy in 2025.
The entire audio/venue biz is heavily driven by mouth-to-mouth propaganda and personal networks. A friend of mine knows Uli Behringer personally - if one of his mixing console hangs itself during a concert you know who's getting a very angry call at 1:00 o'clock. If people stop losing trust in your stuff nobody will buy the rotten product (or worse entire product series) anymore.
It's the same for the video production scene. It will make you very rich if your product is very good - if it blocks a production or even worse destroys a recording you'll be beaten out of the market with fists. And the people will track your records down if you change your legal name if you are trying to back in.
The scene loves and hates with a lot of passion. And they have a memory like elephants and never forgive.
> If you want to enter the market you must beat their stuff price/quality wise
Yeah, if the market you're talking about is "price/quality", but most musical gear doesn't sit in that market, but a wildly different one, and in that one you don't have to beat Behringer to be successful, and granted your stuff is high quality and actually innovative enough, you can almost set the price freely.
> It will make you very rich if your product is very good - if it blocks a production or even worse destroys a recording you'll be beaten out of the market with fists.
I remember working support for a video production data storage company and it being straightforward problems most of the time (9 times out of 10 just walking PAs or AEs through documented steps for swapping a drive in a RAID) but executed under some of the wildest circumstances (a producer calling from a helicopter during a shoot, or hearing an A-list filmmaker yelling at the AE in the background, or security so tight that I'd get confirmation of each step as a photo of the server's screen taken on a phone that's then walked to a place that gets a signal).
In other industries I've worked in, most of those requests never would've made it to a rep's phone, but the table-stakes expectation was that someone was always available to ensure it was done right and to satisfaction, or you lost the client immediately.
When it really was a serious issue and we got shipped out on-site to a client, we were effectively told not to bother coming back if we couldn't diagnose and fix it.
Behringer has made a bunch of old (and now very expensive) synths that the original manufactures really didn't want to make again, available to the public. At a fraction of the price. And more lately they've started to clone a bunch of studio equipment.
When I started out playing music, they were mostly just seen as cheap garbage.
Apart from the cheap plastic case their circuits actually sounded exactly the same that the stuff they cloned, but it took awhile for forum users to publicly acknowledge it.
Also some plastic cases, like in guitar pedals, are sturdy enough for its usage. You need durable switches, but the casing doesn't need to be 2 mm steel. Specially if you use a floor board, the pedals could be made with a cardboard case and be enough.
I make a device akin to a guitar pedal. If you want to use a plastic case, it has to be designed for mechanical ruggedness and protection of the innards. For small time pedal makers, the cost of design and mold tooling rules this out, though I wouldn't try to predict the future of technologies such as 3d printing.
But if you're limited to drilling some holes in an off-the-shelf enclosure, it had better be metallic. I learned that lesson the hard way, and I now use metal boxes exclusively. Luckily for me, my product somehow hasn't attracted the interest of Behringer or other low-cost makers -- yet.
Also, judging from some returns I've gotten, gadgets can be subjected to a lot of abuse. A musician can control this, but a gear maker can't.
I've seen the insides of some early Behringer gear. A lot of their early stuff was mechanically delicate, and showed signs of extensive "re-work" in production.
I have a local pro A/V business- when I started they absolutely -were- cheap garbage. I was forced to work with (and repair) a lot of their consoles, mics, etc over the years and a lot of it was truly bad stuff that was made as cheaply as possible simply to get "something" to that functioned (mostly).
They have gotten a lot better- I have made a lot of money off owning my xr18 over the last 12 years. And if you count midas, the m32 etc has been really good for me too. I've go a pair of the 76kt and they have been useful as well.
It's really great that they are making synths, and cheaply.
Their customer service has been shockingly good. Helped me source a new part for a long out-of-production pedal of theirs. Went into that interaction expecting pretty much nothing, came out pleasantly surprised.
They've got their fair share of missteps too. Love my Behringer Neutron though, never regretted buying it at-launch despite all it's quirks. The noise on the bucket bridge delay has gotten me called some pretty nasty names on forums over the years.
I replaced a blown Phase Linear 400 with a Behringer A800 amp for less money than the replacement output transistors would've cost. The PL400 was well setup, but the A800 sounds better to these old ears.
AWS has certainly had some pretty public facing downtime ;) I'd say its been roughly the same in my experience- the only way to avoid it IMHO is multi-region.
My favorite Jeff Bezos quote is one that applies very much to AWS: "your margin is my opportunity".
Clearly when Amazon realised the enormous potential in AWS, they scrapped that principle. But the idea behind it - that an organisation used to fat margins will not be able to adapt in the face of a competitor built from the ground to live of razor thing margins - still applies.
AWS is ripe for the picking. They "can't" drop prices much, because their big competitors have similar margins, and a price war with them would devastate the earnings of all of them no matter how much extra market share they were to win.
The challenge is the enormous mindshare they have, and how many people are emotionally invested even in believing AWS is actually cost effective.
Yup, that phrase was running through my head as I skimmed the comments.
To that, an interesting observation I’ve made is that their frequency for service price cuts have dropped in the past several years. And the instances of price increases have started to trickle in (like the public IP cost).
If core compute and network keep getting cheaper faster than inflation, and they never drop their prices (or drop them by less relatively) the margins are growing.
The worst aspect of AWS is that once you get to a certain size, you can negotiate bulk agreements, especially for things like bandwidth. At a previous job, we cut our bill down by quite a bit this way, but it was annoying to have to schmooze with sales people.
Great you're pointing it out, as this is also something a lot of organisations are entirely unaware of in my experience.
If you're paying more than a few hundred k/year (worth starting to try below that; success rates will vary greatly) and are still paying the list prices, you might as well set fire to money.
Using a dedicated server for the first time after using VPSes or similar since learning programming and infrastructure is like a whole new world. Suddenly, you feel like the application is running in molasses, and the whole idea of "We need 10 VPS instances" seems so stupid...
Not convinced the language would actually be useful, but I like the ideas for portability.