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Comment by notmypenguin | Hacker News Reader

It’s sad how the entire music industry of actual innovators gets scooped up by conglomerates like InMusic. What is worse, however, is the blatant rip-off business plan of Behringer. They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths. Wanna know why Behringers product line exclusively features other peoples designs that have gone out of patent (or not, see Mackie ripoffs they built their base with). You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware.

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Let's be clear: cloning stuff where the patent has expired is not remotely unethical in an intrinsic sense. Even if you launch the product the very day the patent expires.

It's a clear part of the social contract of innovation patents.

Society says:

- Ideas aren't things you can really own

- Copying stuff means more choice for consumers and lower prices.

- But copying stuff before the innovator has a chance to earn from their work is bad for innovation.

- If we agree an idea is novel and non-trivial (patentable), we grant the innovator the exclusive right to manufacture, to licence, or not to licence, the implementation they describe for a limited period of time, if and only if they describe it in enough detail to reproduce it.

- In so doing, we provoke further innovation as people try to achieve the same without infringing the patent.

That last one is the secondary outcome, not the primary intent of patent law.

The primary intent is to grant limited protection for patent holders to have a chance to earn from their work. "You explain how you did this so other people can do it in the future, and we will grant you the right to licence that idea exclusively for about half your professional lifetime."

Beyond that point, implementing the design is what absolutely should happen -- that is why the patent is basically education about the design itself. Implementing clones of expired patents is a social good. It actually proves the value of the patent system over the longer term.

If we call this behaviour -- if it infringes no other designs -- unethical, we're really arguing for corporate welfare based on goodwill. That isn't how it's meant to work.

Now, whether Behringer is unethical is another matter. There would seem to be enough other evidence of that!

But implementing expired patents is not bad, even if you literally start selling them the day the patent expires. Go for it.

There are similar issues with TTArtisan and 7 Artisan lenses. Yeah, expired patents of good lenses deserve to be implemented, updated, tweaked, and sold more cheaply. Everyone benefits. But do they have to hew so close to other people's design language too?

It’s absolutely unethical when your obvious goal is to loss-lead everyone else into either bankruptcy or selling out. I am a consumer of music gear. Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative. They poison the well!

Uli Behringer is also the quintessential slimy shady businessman, look it up.

Behringer is bad for the music gear industry, and I say that as a producer and musician of over 40 years. I wish them a swift exit from this world, but the reality is their cheap products tempt many people but it’s extremely shortsighted to ever buy Behringer.

Is Behringer loss-leading? They have invested almost nothing in research and development for their little synths as they use long expired designs that require technology developed decades ago (dirt cheap).

As a part time musician, my take is the opposite of yours. Behringer made instruments that were once owned by a small, non-inclusive wealthy elite (relatively speaking) available to everyone in rich and poor countries. The sheer number of decent quality clones - and I say "clone" as a good thing - they produced will be available in the secondary market for decades to come.

And if Behringer can do it to the competition -- using their expired patents and making a still-competitive product -- then someone else can do it to Behringer.*

This is the preferred outcome of the patent system! Someone got to make a design for 25 years with the protection of the system, and now everyone can. And if you don't innovate, you don't get the protection.

* Edit: including the very firms Behringer is cloning, after all.

Even Behringer gear gets 'cloned' by the likes of Mooer and Donner these days. It is the natural way / cost of doing business.

(rumor has it the Donner B1 is based on designs of B's TD-3)

I don't get these sanctimonius types that go like 'oh noes, its the music / gear industry, thats different, ethics, values, full of cool dudes, etc. etc. blaaargh'. Especially mentioning ETHICS in the friggin' MUSIC INDUSTRY is just so hahaha.

Fundamentally I think the music industry has long-standing patterns to deal with this, anyway. It's hardly new.

Almost every contemporary musical instrument company in the world makes a Stratocaster (or sells one made by Aiersi or the other contemporary equivalents of Young Chang and the like). But people still buy Fender kit, including American Stratocasters and custom-shop US Stratocasters.

They absolutely have invested in R&D. The clones are not trivial component-for-component copies. A lot of old parts aren't available any more and the circuits have to be rebuilt around what's available today. They've added MIDI and USB features. They built their own chip division to resurrect the chips of the 80s. They built products like the DeepMind which is Juno-ish but not really a clone.

What they did do was nuke the Veblen Good aspect of synth collecting. High-end vintage collectables are far more likely to be bought by doctors, lawyers, and other dabblers than by full-time creatives.

There's still some of that happening, and always will be. But it's a much wider market now and more people can get the technology - even if it's just for dabbling - than before.

Always fun to see Veblen Goods mentioned.

There's a running joke in photography that Leicas are a great choice for a dentist.

That is a blatant distortion of the truth. They have invested Nothing in New Designs, nothing For The Future, and I find your defense of Behringer utterly disingenuous. Legacy: what legacy of designs, ORIGINAL DESIGNS, has Behringer left us? R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design. Name me ONE original Behringer product.

> R&D was not intended to signify honing a rip-off design, but indicates an original design.

The whole tone of your comment is rude, but this in particular is a straw man argument. R&D is just the department (and budget) of a business concerned with product improvement. That absolutely can involve improving on other people's products. And improvements can just be that it is cheaper to produce, or easier to produce at scale. The idea that R&D is a room-full of paid inventors is a myth.

This is a misuse of the word “disingenuous”. “Disingenuous” is when someone pretends to be stupid, and there’s no valid reason to use that word here. “Disingenuous” is probably the most cliché and tired way to add unnecessary vitriol to a comment on HN.

Neutron

Neutron, Proton, DeepMind, PolyD, Wing, X32, and the BCR series

The official line now is they're moving on from clones into original designs.

The real problem with Behringer is the low cost and not-a-trophy accessibility. No one complains about UDO's JP6 knock off or Groove's 3RD Wave, even though they're very close clones with a few added features.

Perhaps because they're reassuringly expensive trophy products, while Behringer's aren't.

Some of that old tech is starting to be very NOT cheap, as the chips haven't been manufactured in 30 years and stockpiles are growing ever slimmer. Germanium stuff for fuzz boxes for instance are now sometimes going for $50+ for a single transistor that would have been 25 cents a few decades ago.

Can you prove Behringer is actually loss-leading? Selling something that does not make normal profit? If you can prove that, why can't Moog?

It is simply not unethical to spot an expired patent and reproduce it at near zero profit with minimal changes, if you can make money at it. This is how patents work. If an idea works, 25 years later someone sells it cheaper, with a few modifications. Almost every product on the market now contains ideas in an expired patent. The pace of innovation means a lot of those patents expired recently.

It would be unethical to try to pass it off as identical, but one of the main problems with design is companies not actively adding their own non-essential elements to design. If form follows function, then it cannot be unethical to reproduce the form when you implement the patent.

There are (some) laws against making products that don't even make normal profit (by which I mean not paying the entrepreneur) if used anti-competitively. But Moog, Akai etc., would all have the kinds of lawyers who could prove it. So it is probably -- I would say almost certainly -- not happening.

Why do you say they are loss leading? They presumably are not. Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs.

If anything this should drive innovation not stifle it. Other hardware manufacturers are now required to innovate and actually spend on R&D to sell hardware at higher prices instead of just selling the same old designs they created in the 80.

Right. The pressure of a patent that is due to expire is itself a motivation to make a patentable improvement. And so the cycle repeats.

But at the same time you reboot that product you're going to look at your competitors' innovations, especially the ones that are now out of patent protection, and consider reimplementing the features you had to work around with your more convoluted, non-infringing methods, using the original patented method. Because if it stood the test of time it is a good design.

It's in the nature of things.

I am sure Behringer is a bit on the slimy side, but implementing expired patents is what literally everyone does.

You're not understanding economies of scale.

Small businesses can't get parts at nearly the cost of a Behringer, because small businesses can't bankroll a Chinese city dedicated to making your stuff (with or without slave labor, labor costs are likewise unapproachable by small businesses)

Behringer are explicitly trying to get people to show the attitude you show, implying that small instrument and effect creators are ripping people off by not pricing their stuff like a titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities and stockpiles parts by the millions. You cannot get the economies of scale Behringer gets.

And yeah they have a Chinese attitude toward property. I'm in the process of getting a reverb unit, a pricey one with some pretty fancy DAC hardware built in, which was so explicitly ripped off by Behringer that the clone had to be yanked from the market. You don't hear about the times they're busted because they would rather not have that be known: the publically obvious stuff is the stuff where there's not a lot of point in fighting it (see, titanic multinational conglomerate that owns cities).

You are wrong that Behringer's business model drives innovation; it explicitly makes it impossible to operate in any way other than as an open source/sharing-economy model that undercuts them as they can't literally undercut 'free'. In so doing, you have to accept poverty. That's the only way to compete with what they are. That, or try to make your money between creating a thing, having it be successful, and having them knock it off for pennies on the dollar in costs.

Did you say 'vastly overcharging'? ;)

I wasn't saying all of Behringer's business practices are good. But specifically cloning out-of-patent designs from the 80s is exactly what should be done by such a large mass-producer, those components should be commoditised!

Cloning new designs is obviously worse and maybe the patent system doesn't provide the desired protection in those cases.

Exploiting economies of scale is not loss-leading, though.

It's a tough lesson, for sure, and it repeats all across industry, and it leaves a bad taste in the mouth, but making things for less profit is not making a loss. And nor is making things in China.

I'm sure Korg, Moog, Akai etc., all need to step up on pushing for greater respect for copyrights and patents in China. As do Arca-Swiss and RRS in the photography world. (e.g. there is a single Leofoto product that is not available for sale in Europe because Arca-Swiss had some success in demonstrating it is a close copy; Leofoto have moved on to other more innovative designs)

And here is an unfortunate lesson: if you continue to sell a product for the same price as you could charge before your patent expired, after it expires, then yeah. You are almost certainly overcharging, even if you don't know it yet.

More to the point, you are saying that a small firm can't compete with Behringer, because Behringer can achieve an economy of scale.

But if e.g. Moog had patent protection, and all the product skill and knowledge and the killer brand, are you really saying that achieving the economy of scale was something they had never thought about, in all the time the designs were protected by innovation and design patents? They could not recognise the potential market and the possible economy of scale?

The reality is that they could have done exactly that (Marshall did, for example, and so did Fender and Gibson/Epiphone, who are not really harmed by their clone markets but have very successfully differentiated into them while selling a product that is largely unchanged for a human lifetime).

The strategy that Moog, and Leica, and Arca-Swiss, and any number of brands like this have to take is to make a virtue of making the thing the same way they always have, to the same standard they always have.

And if Behringer can say "we're not over-expensive like those guys", Moog can say "we're not cheap and nasty like those people". They can market into the clone market as a luxury, quality alternative (and even with a differentiated product -- like Fender did with the Mexican or Japanese ranges, with Squier etc).

Engaging with the idea that it is parasitic to implement an expired patent for low cost (which is wholly untrue and at odds with the system of patents itself), or buying into inaccurate definitions of "loss-leading" is in many ways just picking one of the sides in a war over a commoditised product with luxury roots. (If it is not also toying with anti-Chinese sentiment)

> Instead they are reasonably pricing out-of-patent hardware designs which the original manufacturers are apparently vastly overcharging for decades after they have recouped their R&D costs.

That's fine but they do stuff like this:

https://www.behringer.com/product.html?modelCode=P0E2V

https://www.arturia.com/products/keystep/overview

Where it is just a copied thing near 1:1 of product currently being sold, changed just enough to not be sued for making exact copy

And not just big companies but smaller modular ones like this:

https://synthanatomy.com/2023/05/behringer-abacus-a-ripoff-o...

Tho to be fair original maths is based on some old Buchla modules.

I have nothing against resurrecting stuff out of production or produced so long patent expired (they had their chance) but near-copy of current stuff is a bit much.

On the other hand, shouldn't "those that produce new technologies" be producing new technologies, instead of milking 60-year old designs?

Behringer is essentially producing a copy of Ford-T...

If you can't monetize your product within extremely generous patent lifetime giving it more time won't change much.

Patents already do more to stifle innovation than to help them.

> Behringer actively harms my future ability to obtain new technologies because they kill those who produce them and produce nothing original or innovative

Okay, what company they actually killed by making a clone ? I haven't heard of single one.

I do agree that cloning products currently in production (best recent example being behringer swing) is below belt, but there is NOTHING wrong in resurrecting hardware current manufacturer stopped making, only people "losing" on it are people trying to sell used ones for ungodly amount of money

You're using as an example of bad behavior one of the best examples of something good that Behringer has done. Those chips should be cloned, and now there are, I believe, at least three manufacturers of 3340 oscillator chips: CEM, Coolaudio, and Alfa. It's a very popular VCO chip in a number of eurorack modules, and has better tracking of volt-per-octave than any other analog VCO type I've used by far.

Also, not very long ago those chips had been out of production. I believe CEM re-released their 3340 in 2016. I'm not sure if Coolaudio beat them to it, but anyways there was a long period where the only way to get new batches of the chip would have been to clone it.

There are a lot of examples of legitimately bad behavior from Behringer as well.

Tell that to Curtis widow. The goal of this is not magnanimity but to drive other synth makers to bankruptcy with cheap zero R&D synths. I am not speaking out of my behind here. If Behringer succeeds, the world of music gear LOSES. If you want a 3340 clone buy Alfa for half the price and don’t feed CoolAudio

I'm sorry for her, but why do you think she's entitled to eternal earnings over this invention? When husbands die, the widow is lucky if they left behind savings and some real estate - that's what one should expect.

If this invention is so good, the original Curtis could have used his earnings at the time to buy other durable assets instead of expecting the invention to be giving dividends forever. Let's remember that every invention builds on top of many other invention that are leveraged free of cost (like the transistor in this case).

I did not like Behringer in the 90s when they built their original fortune by violating Mackie patents.

However, what is wrong with perfectly cloning a chip whose patents have expired?

Analogy would be with a drug whose patents have expired. If generic analogs are available, everone benefits except the original company.

Everyone wins, who is the loser here?

Curtis family have the right to be upset but they do not have the right to perpetual profits.

https://ask.audio/articles/curtis-family-speaks-out-against-...

Were they accused of violating patents? I thought that was a copyright/trademark dispute, and the suit failed in part because copyright doesn't protect device manufacturers against competitors making a product with the same schematic. I think that's a good thing.

...Uli took a piss in your cereal or are you on a crusade or something, to defend every audio gear corp under the sun against evil Musictribe? There are so many others already doing the same, you don't need to waste your time.

Go outside, it is very healthy :)

I do use Alfa VCOs (or anyways AI Synthesis does, and I bought the chips through them to build some of their VCO modules), but it seems weird you'd recommend them over CEM, since presumably they're "ripping off" Curtis' design just as much as CoolAudio -- or does Alfa pay a licensing fee to CEM?

You might be right that Behringer is bad for the music industry in other ways and that I shouldn't support them through CoolAudio, but I don't see anything wrong with cloning an old chip. Patents are for a limited time and I think that's a good thing. If CoolAudio made an identical copy of the chip layout, maybe CEM could go after them for copyright violation, but I'm not aware of any claims that CoolAudio did that.

Cheaper and more available parts is better for the industry no matter which way you cut it.

While I'm no fan of Uli's business practises, he does expose the fact that the uniqueness of a lot of gear is way overstated. And we havent seen actual innovation from the likes of Moog, Roland, Korg since the 90:ies maybe. So if they insist on repackeging the same ROMpler and Curtis chips at ever higher prices... Clone away.

unfortunately he also clones things that aren't Rompler and curtis chips.

I have a behringer model d and a pro one. They're fine machines.

But when they Behringer Swing seems to me to be a 1:1 clone of the Arturia Keystep which is not an old device, I kind of understand why everyone hates Behringer.

OMG, here we have another one...

> They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.

Because OnChip Systems were totally getting their act together and fulfilled the demand for vintage re-issues? Nope, not at all, they sat on their asses just like Roland.

(Nice annecdote re: sitting on their asses / not fulfilling market demand: It is an open secret Dave Smith didn't want to re-issue his old but very much in-demand designs but was basically forced by B's Pro-16 announcement to develop their P5 rev 4, otherwise the Seq fanbois would not have gotten that! Makes one wonder about the backstory of howbthe OB-X8 came to life...)

But at least Curtis' widow pulled off publishing a public statement condemning Behringer 'hurting' Curtis' legacy. Oh wow.

And what is your opinion on Alfa Rpar? Should they be disallowed to produce reissues too? Are you even aware of their existence?

I, for one, am very happy that Behringer is making $350 devilfish 303s despite what that nice fellow in Australia thinks about it. He wasn't going to get my money anyway.

It's sad how some people think companies should have perpetual monopolies on things that were patented 50+ years ago.

What about stuff from two years ago?

Well patented stuff from 2 years ago is still covered by patent, so you can't copy it without getting sued usually. That's why the patent system exists.

They make great synths though and sell them, for cheap. Pretty damn innovative to me.

You can compete on differentiation, niche, or cost right? That’s all good business and good for the consumer.

Ideas are only as valuable as their execution makes them. Otherwise, there’d be lots of “ideas” for sale on eBay.

Sure I am annoyed that in many cases they rip it 1:1 without improvement, and that they rip some products actively in production.

But in greater scheme of things it's some products authors already paid NRE few tens or hundreds times over vs musician having access to gear they couldn't dream of owning few years ago.

And I have absolutely no problems with cloning products already out of production.

> You may say, well, that’s capitalism, but no, dear reader, it’s shady and involves no new R&D work, no innovation, and since their business model is loss-leading everyone else out of business, it’s parasitic and will result in stifled innovation in music hardware.

Oh you sweet summer child if you only knew how often the designs are copied with slight change in that space... hell, whole guitar pedal market is incest over incest for last 60+ years

> They went so far as to buy the chip company CoolAudio to build clones of the Curtis CEM3340 oscillator chip featured in all these 80’s polysynths.

...so the chip is still produced and people can use it vs possibly going out of business. How is that bad ?

Behringer did release their own "Neutron" (and soon "Proton"), but I generally agree with your points. Also they've cloned Moog gear that's <10 years old.

I can blindly distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio and I don't even have good ears (at least for one instrument I did that experiment on). It's just a signal, I'm sure it can be copied perfectly but Moog still seems to be doing wrooms like no other.

Pretty sure they managed to clone Model D really well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYxc8R_Qys0

> I can blindly distinguish distinguish Moog from Behringer with compressed youtube audio

Which Moog/Behringer combo was it? In the case of DFAM/Edge the filters are different (Ladder vs. something more standard)

> It's just a signal

I don't think that's fair. Analogue stuff goes through a signal path with so many different components where even minuscule differences at any point could lead to quite different results at the end.

It would be funny if there was a community effort to make a schematic of the Neutron or Proton, design a board, and have it manufactured at JLCPCB or wherever. Sell it as a kit with all the SMD components already populated, all you have to do is solder in the through-hole jacks and pots and whatever. Use a Eurorack module form factor so it doesn't need an enclosure. Sell it at cost, which would probably be way less than the Behringer product sells for.

I think you are underestimating the difficulty of producing something. Just check what happens with 90% of kickstarters that need to produce stuff.

And I know what I'm talking about because I thought about doing something like what you propose for a while, and I concluded that I'd never be able to beat Behringer. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just not easy and Behringer has a lot of merit in being efficient at producing these synths.

You can't make a business doing that, quite correct.

If there is any other merit to what you're looking to do, and you can float the cost, you can make a thing happen and see if it's too niche for Behringer: if it's that popular, you'll get a knock-off for pennies on the dollar and your best bet is to position yourself as the original, and accept your market got ate.

I don't think Moog is ONLY selling out because its Minimoog got cloned by the Behringer D, but I've owned a Behringer D and soundwise it wasn't half bad: many decisions made were in the service of the thing actually sounding good, at least in the revision I had. I own a Moog Sub Phatty and swapped out the side panels for aftermarket wood ones, because it had the 'sticky plastic' issue, and the octave switch for octave 1 ain't working. The flagship Moog One synths have had some issues. This sort of thing is brutal on a small business… they're paying more for their parts and labor, but they'll run into the same issues that Behringer or any manufacturer will.

You won't out-Behringer Behringer. It's exactly the sort of T-Rex you don't want to battle directly. There is nothing stopping you from being a small mammal scurrying about making stuff. Come up with a business model that bootstraps and does what you need, and don't attempt to get capital that would demand a 10x return while knowing Behringer exists, as you can't have a 10x return at all, ever. You can probably still make stuff but you have to design the business, not just the product.

I think you are overestimating the difficulty of producing something. Start building stuff as a hobby, and decide that you want to build it as efficiently as possible because you are lazy. You'll quickly realize that building synthesizers and in particular Eurorack modules is easy and cheap if this is what you're focusing on.

What this means: with a Eurorack module, you don't need a case or power supply, since that's provided by the Eurorack "infrastructure". All you need is a "front panel" on your module as well as certain connectors, and probably one of the cheapest ways to build such a front panel is by manufacturing another PCB with the right size and the right holes. You can do that e.g. at JLCPCB, for <1€ per front panel. Building the synthesizer is similarly easy: design the circuit, create a PCB design that uses modern technology and SMT machine assembly, and you can get even "complex" designs manufactured cheaply, to the point that you can even beat Behringer yourself. After all, you don't have to live from selling such modules, and your development time is "free". And the best part: once you have a working design, you can get as many more modules manufactured as you want, for significantly decreasing prices if you manufacture them in slightly larger batches.

To give you an idea, I recently built a small PCB with "transistor ladder filters", but since they are small and cheap, I extended them and made the feedback path voltage controlled and also added a VCA directly after every filter. A PCB with 8 of them, manufactured and assembled at JLCPCB, cost around 30€. For completeness, this was for a 8 voice polyphonic Eurorack synthesizer module, which means this PCB didn't need any knobs/buttons/jacks/displays. Meanwhile Behringer sells a single "Moog VCF" in Eurorack format for >100€.

I will guess that you've never sold electronics at scale, with box, manual, per-country regulatory rules, customs, warranty, inventory etc. It's great that you have produced this small little module, but this is very far from what Behringer is doing. It's like comparing a personal Github repo with commercial software.

That's true that it's hard to run a profitable business doing this, but I think you're missing the point. If a person's goal isn't to earn a living but just have a hobby that financially breaks even selling kits on Tindie or whatever, the costs are surprisingly low.

Also,there's a lot of very good software used by many people that came from some person's personal github account. Hobbyist can and do compete favorably with commercial software all the time, but of course it's not as easy to make a living that way than it is to just put something out there that's useful.

Why on earth would someone go thru the effort to sell it at cost thought ?

Also you underestimate economies of scale behringer can employ, I'd be surprised if you could get close to their price.

You can look at various DIY stuff and you will probably notice that getting stuff DIY isn't all that much cheaper

I'll throw you an example:

Maths, which Behringer cloned, costs ~$300 fully assembled

Befaco Rampage, which is pretty much equivalent to Maths, costs $185 in DIY kit.

Behringer Abacus is $100

They are basically selling them at price or below what DIY kit would sell, and not that far off "cost of components"

I could see a well-motivated hobbyist or group of hobbyists doing the design for fun, or to make a point. People do similarly ambitious things all the time.

Behringer has impressive scale, but honestly I think for PCB manufacture and assembly, JLCPCB probably has them beat -- and any random hobbyist has access to JLCPCB.

The cost of Maths and Rampage has more to do with having to earn enough to pay all their employees and make a decent profit that the actual marginal cost of manufacturing one more module. Maths is very popular, but it's still a fairly low-volume market.

I think one thing it would be hard to compete with Behringer on is enclosures. But maybe that doesn't matter; a Neutron/Proton clone wouldn't necessarily need one if it's a Eurorack module.

I completely agree with you, but how is that not capitalism?

Seems like capitalism at work to me. Is the implication capitalism is somehow intrinsically ethical? That’s a laugh.

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