I am curious how the pictured A2B board interfaces with the X/M32 board. If that's an AES50 implementation then maybe there's the possibility someone could roll up an AES50 router. That could be cool.
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.
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.
The audio world has history here. A simple TSR audio jack can be used for either stereo or balanced audio, headphone or mic or (multiple) line levels, hi-Z instruments, two incompatible MIDI (digital) connectors, multiple incompatible foot controller connectors, etc.
I joked to a friend once that it would be far better if we just used a single connector type for everything in audio and get rid of jacks, XLR, power connectors, MIDI, etc. They liked the idea - I deadpan suggested regular mains plugs and sockets would be good - cheap, ubiquitous and sturdy.
But the advantage of reusing cabling that already exists in 100% of the venues, stages and churches cannot be overstated. It is literally a drop-in upgrade, boom, now a single cable carries 32 channels instead of 1.
I don't think it's completely new purpose for XLR, I'm fairly sure I've seen other stuff than audio being pulled through XLR more than once even in professional environments.
I worked as a tech at a stage for a short while. We always used XLR5 for lighting and XLR3 for audio.
You can tow a car with it and then use it to work a festival with Tier 1 bands afterwards without any problems. Most likely it will work even better than before.
Also differential signal nature by design is the standard - It's like CAN. This kills 99% of non-wanted signals coming from the wire physically.
It is rare you see anything in the audio world with an XLR that can not survive an accidental encounter with phantom power. People are paranoid about it but for some reason have no issue with phono being use for speaker connects which is far more likely to kill gear. I used to repair audio gear, every bit of gear I encountered that got fried by phantom power had an XLR to TRS in the mix.
(Though just read up that the CEO/Founder of Music Tribe is Uli Behringer)
Most of them use standard CAT cables for this since that is what has been made for the transmission of network data for reasonably long distances. You can replace the RJ-45 plugs with Ethercon connectors if you need it extra rugged and reliable.
Ravenna, AVB and MADI are already existing, open standards that do even more, but I guess they are too expensive because of the ultra low latency requirements and FPGAs involved.
The use of an specialized automotive audio bus IC is interesting and probably gets the cost down, but within a car cable lengths are rarely comparable to what would happen in a concert venue. According to Behringer there is a 15m max cable distance per spec. That is.. too low for practise. Maybe for a small rehearsal room or so, but if you go from a front of house mixer to the stage 15m is nothing, especially if you can't run it the direct way.
Nice of them opening it up still.
https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data...
> If anything smaller players are now extremely careful to open source stuff exactly because of them.
That's the problem with all open source. If you open source something good, someone else is going to run with it.
They brought products that, while not top quality, had decent quality for an unbeatable price. I'm not sure their gear is the best for traveling musicians, but is perfect for the home.
In my mind, Behringer didn't revolutionized anything, but rather iterated their way to fame. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price, as your comment allude to.
Not to say that isn't an achievement in itself, to build same quality gear for cheap, but I'm not sure "revolutionized" is a word I'd use to describe them.
Making something cheaper can be innovative, depending on how you achieved that. But if you launched a product that is the same as a competitor only because it's cheaper, because your company is funded by VCs who can continuously inject cash to bleed your competitor, I wouldn't call that "innovative" at all.
But if you instead had figured out a way to actually create the same hardware but in a cheaper way, so that's why the price is cheaper, then you did innovative in the creation process, but I still wouldn't call the finished product innovative, I'd be more focused on the process itself.
The other is talking about market revolution, where market dynamics change, typically by lowering the price.
Your comment reads like "IBM didn't revolutionize anything. None of the stuff they release is really "innovative" except when you consider the price (...)"
As far as I know, IBM did have impressive technical innovations at first, like the Vacuum Tube Multiplier, but then at one point they stopped innovating and instead focused on basically business optimizations.
So yeah, I guess a bit similar to IBM, but that isn't the full story.
I got a Behringer WING a couple of years ago, and I couldn't be happier for my home studio: Excellent connection with Midas stage boxes who have (at least for my requirements) great pre-amps, you can basically route everything, it's kind of intuitive, the possibilities are endless, it's at the same time a 32-channel USB Audio Interface which works great with Logic, I can even live-stream multi channel audio to my Mac in the other room to Logic using the DANTE card, it has easy live recording with SD cards, remote control via iPad and even 3rd party apps with APIs, etc. etc. etc. … And they just released a rack and smaller version of it, but didn't cut on the features.
As we say in Germany, maybe it's some kind of "What the farmer doesn't know, he won't eat" syndrome. From what I know and use, I am a big fan of Behringer, and especially the WING.
jdboyd•5h ago