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Comment by throw_m239339 | Hacker News Reader

"Business is war"... there are very little ethical businessmen out there so you're swimming among sharks and think that it becomes a game of ripping off each others.

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.

Does the market tend to find "inefficient" areas and someone comes in and "maximize efficiency"? I think Behringer is trying to catch all revenue in that space...

edit: changed some phrasing.

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> 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...

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

At least with Edge and Crave they changed the UI so someone wouldn't necessarily know it's a clone unless they were familiar with both synths.

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?

the advantage of keeping the UI the same is that you don't have to relearn a new interface.

I don't know... but they didn't change much the UI for many older synths. Maybe some kind of patent expiration at play here ? I'm not into legal matters.

I suppose the interface might be covered by design patents, which are sort of like trademarks. I doubt it would be covered by a utility patent unless there was something really unusual about the interface. At any rate, patents expire after 20 years, and trademarks do not. Copyright could theoretically come into play, but I think the "look and feel" lawsuit pretty much established that it's pretty darned hard to enforce any kind of copyright on a user interface.

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.)

> 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.

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.

They changed the step buttons on the RD-8 though as Roland has trademarked this particular color scheme. (It is not written 'colorway', we are not in sneaker territory)

https://cdm.link/2019/02/roland-303-808-trademarks/

Since Behringer usually keep clones as close to the original as possible, I think this was a strategy to avoid legal issues when cloning something recent. These ones are functionally equivalent, but presented quite differently.

What are the Edge & Crave copies of, also Moog gear? I thought those were original Behringer products, with pretty decent sounding demos.

Crave, Edge, and now the just-announced Spice are more or less one-to-one replications of the signal paths and controls of the Mother-32, DFAM, and Subharmonicon respectively.

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.

> a Moog rip-off

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.

> 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...

This is a bit condescending. There’s much more nuance, variation, experimentation in synthesizer interfaces then what your comment suggests.

Of course there's variation, but most analog-style synthesizers still use the same basic oscillator waveforms (sawtooth, sine, triangle, square), some ADSR envelope variant and some LFO's.

That doesn't make them feel or look the same.

> most analog-style synthesizers still use the same basic oscillator waveforms (sawtooth, sine, triangle, square), some ADSR envelope variant and some LFO's.

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.

Copying old designs is perfectly fine - designing things is hard, but it's not the only hard thing out there.

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.

Depends who is doing it and why. Music gear is sometimes expensive for a reason. Shall all small synth makers go bankrupt there will be no one for Behringer to copy. Only old and rip-off designs from now on…

Soundwise those are quite poor copies.

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.

> Soundwise those are quite poor copies.

No they're not... at least on the clones I have, they nailed it. And yes I have the originals.

Some people keep saying this, but I can hear a very clear difference.

It's like people who say that Arturia's VSTs are exactly like the real thing - to which I can only say "Huh???"

"differences" is not the same as "poor copies". You can even hear differences between different exemplar of the same analog synth, depending on components selection, calibration, age, etc.

Classic analog synths rarely sounded exactly like other copies of themselves. There was quite a large variation from device to device. I anticipate the Behringer stuff to be more consistent. As far as how close they sound it will depend on the particular example of classic synth you compare it to.

> There is a psychopathic edge - like cloning MI's Plaits, which many suspect helped push Émilie out of the business, to everyone's loss.

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.

Behringer attracts more attention. Arturia used MI code in the MicroFreak and falsely claimed they had Gillet's blessing, nobody cared. Arturia make VST clones of every popular synth out and charge $500, nobody cares. Behringer makes an affortable version of the Model D because Moog never bothered to and people complain.

Maybe. Brains was announced in 2021. Gillet quit in 2022.

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.

Here we go again. I saw this coming:

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.

My 2600 sounds incredible although I have no idea whether its sounds like the original. I also have their Neutron which is a great original design. I hope they focus more on original designs in the future.

It's incredible how Behringer has gone from making total garbage to making pretty decent stuff. I mean who wouldn't want a Pro-One for 250 bucks? I threw my credit card at the screen soon as I saw it. Then again if I was behind the original Pro-One I'd be outraged.

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.

>"Business is war"...

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.

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