Yes, but Amazon is a vertical monopoly and a horizontal monopoly. Everyone who is cloned by Amazon is relying on selling their goods through Amazon. So Amazon has the ability and incentive to bury those products the second they make their clone. Behringer does not have this ability, though I imagine they wish they did.
Also there is a difference in the products cloned. Amazon is cloning cheap things and making them cheaper. No one is going to wax poetic about the HDMI cable that got cloned. Behringer is cloning sought after instruments.
I know people get annoyed that they focus more on their clones than innovating. but if I were a fan of either, I’d be more annoyed that they have several teased/announced/upcoming long-term vaporware products and instead just spend their time chasing Moog around.
I hesitate to get into the topic, but I’ve been thinking about what rubs me the wrong way about the DFAM and SubH clones in particular (well above and beyond the Crave): I think it’s the fact that these are not just truly unique and well-executed designs, but they also represent what strikes me as a substantial risk for a smallish company to take.
The workshops that led to the production units, the niche-within-a-niche they were going for. The Mother is comparably “safer” as a toe dipped into Eurorack for Moog, but these two constitute IMO a risky and deeply interesting reimagining of how a semi-modular system can work. It could have been a flop, and there are definitely reviewers who couldn’t grok the SubH in particular… And now that they’ve attained sort of modern classic status, B sweeping into what I imagine is a smaller market than for Crave or Model D to begin with… I do not wish them well, and this decision and the Maths clone convince me further to take some care not to buy products or parts from Behringer or their subsidiaries (CoolAudio is in a lot of stuff).
Those aren’t the only products Amazon clones; and like Behringer Amazon has cloned some decent selling products from small time companies.
What Behringer is doing here is the same category of thing - copying someone elses idea, while the product is still moderately hot (and still being sold by the original company at a reasonable price), and crushing them price-wise with their vertical integration.
Maybe a synth company only gets 3-4 years before a product gets cloned. Maybe that isn’t worth the time and resources to get creative, though, and they just stop.
What Behringer has done for me is taken an image of a company that made solid products, back in the late 90s…I wanted a B mixer so bad.
To a company that I would never consider buying anything from, no matter what the price. And makes me feel dirty for having a patch bay of theirs in my rack. When I get a job, my first order of business will be to take said patch bay out to the bin, break it into pieces and replace it with something else.
All I can do to stop them from their shady dealings is just not support them. Won’t make a difference, but again, that’s all I can do. Oh, and drop the occasional B meme.
I had one of those and I thought it was a great product at the time (an MX1602, I think, in a cheap-ish slant top rack case with 12u underneath). A 16 channel Mackie was beyond my means.
I agree with you, but I do think it is important to distinguish what Amazon is doing as taking those same concepts even one step further into a realm that has relatively little precedence in the last 50 years.
Yeah, i think the Octatrack is safe. Nobody could ever clone it. It takes years to fully learn it, how much time would it take to learn how to build one?
I think the main difference is that Amazon isn’t a manufacturer. They rebadge stuff made by other people. At least this is my assumption. So it’s more of a white labelling situation. Those companies are probably ripping off other companies of course.
Most of the stuff sold on Amazon these days is Alibaba junk from dropshippers - I’ve found it quite a difficult shop to navigate for the last several years tbh, and the name brand stuff they sell is barely even competitively priced. I think that Prime was a genius idea that’s locked a lot of people into buying stuff from them unnecessarily. It’s a different online world today and I’m surprised theyre still doing as well as they are.
Hmmm - I’m not sure that’s a good example because Mackie took Behringer to court at the time over those mixers. The matter was settled.
IMO the reason to not buy Behringer is because it spends its energy innovating in the wrong areas - its takes existing designs, copies them as closely as they’re legally able to and then sells the results for a fraction of the price of the original. That’s innovative from a business perspective (no one else is doing that at scale), an engineering perspective (creating a $300 analog clone of a Moog Model D while still making a profit takes engineering skill), but not a conceptual/design perspective - Behringer doesn’t offer anything ‘new’, it just copies other people’s ideas.
On the other hand, I don’t agree with the argument that you shouldn’t buy Behringer because they’ll drive the little guy bankrupt. IMO it’s not a zero sum game - Moog and Make Noise operate in different market segments to Behringer with different customers. And even if they did share the same customer base, Behringer’s business model is always ‘second to market’, so the ‘first to market’ companies like Moog will always have a clear run for a few years, and Behringer won’t clone an unsuccessful product, meaning that the first to market companies should have already made some decent money from their designs before Behringer steps in.
I’d also say that the used market is a bit of a leveller. If I buy a used DFAM I’ll be able to sell it for what I paid for it. If I buy a new Edge (for less than half the price of a used DFAM) and then sell it, I’ll lose money on the transaction. My outlay for the DFAM was higher, but I lost more money on the Edge. So buying Behringer products can be a false economy.
I’ve also not seen a drop in used prices for the products Behringer clones. There’s often talk about it, but the price of a used MiniMoog didn’t drop when Behringer’s clones came out (even though they sound the same), just like the price of an 808 didn’t drop when Roland put out the TR-8s (or Behringer the RD-8), or an original System 100M.
Disclosure - I own a Moog Sub 37 (which I think is possibly the Best Monosynth Ever) and a few Behringer System 100M clone modules. I plan on buying an Edge when it becomes available because I want MIDI and IMO the DFAM is too pricey for what it offers. Though if I find a good deal on a used DFAM I may change my mind…
This really captures the essence of it: that Behringer is happy to so quickly and nakedly capitalize on risks that other designers have taken. The copies of the contemporary Moog models are positively shameless, and really should be very worrying for those of us who appreciate and wish for boutique synth companies to continue to surprise and delight us with genuinely novel UI/UX and sound architecture design.
I have less of a problem with cloning designs for an instrument that is no longer produced, or perhaps is only available through nostalgic reissues at exorbitant prices. There are a number of classic Roland drum machine clones that few seem to have a problem with.
One looks at a company like Arturia, which to me seems like it balances the line pretty well. Its soft synths clones tend to capture models long out of patent, or even have the original manufacturer’s blessing, and they produce some seriously high quality and novel hardware. The poly and matrix brutes are legit high-end machines, and the freaks are crazy value and do things not easily replicated elsewhere.
I just wish my Boog didn’t sound so goddamned good, and wasn’t so fun to play.
More people in general want synths these days, and there will always be those who will only buy from boutique companies. There will always be a lot of people who look at behringer like Squiers. I think Behringer has helped grow the synth market, and those new people they get hooked go on to buy Korg, sequential, and so on. Like, why wouldnt they? And there’s a bigger market now, so I don’t understand all the doomsday
