[New BEHRINGER Products]

[TubularCorporation]

It might be different now that Euro is more popular, but Eurorack stuff was generally cheaper in the EU than the USA for a long time in my experience (which admittedly was limited to pricing things and quickly nopeing because it was so expensive).

 

The cheapest I'm seeing here with some cursory Googling is about $13 for a single 60hp rail with no inserts and another $7-$8 per strip,not counting shipping.

This is the style that are in the case I've got (two pair with strips, 84hp): https://www.amazon.com/Tiptop-Audio-Z-Rails-104HP-Pair/dp/B01JK4CT3M/

 

EDIT: for manufacturers buying in quantity it's obviously a different story, the undoubtedly get these parts for a lot less (and are often the ones reselling them at these prices because they're a specialty item here).

 

Of course you can just make a wooden box and screw your modules into it and forget about all this stuff.

Edited December 19, 2019 by TubularCorporation

[TubularCorporation]

The ones that really get me are the cases that are literally rebrands of knockoff Pelican cases you can get for like $70 on Monoprice, with some rails and a basic power supply installed (the rails are bolted through from the outside, which kind of compromises the waterproofness that makes that style of case so attractive, incidentally) and then resell them for $600+.

[user]

8 hours ago, rhmilo said:

People think their "expensive modules" are special and need special protection when in fact the circuits are very simple by modern standards and use components that are very basic and dirt cheap these days - and of a significantly higher quality than they were back in the seventies when this sort of tech was advanced. White label power bricks these days produce perfectly serviceable clean power and provide enough protection against power surges for your modules. A busboard, too, is a simple affair. Check out this DIY version: 

 

Something like this costs pretty much nothing when you build them in bulk.

The case? It's just plastic. Should cost little more than your average household bucket.

And those fancy aluminium rails? Bog standard stuff. Even Thomann sells them for 5.5 euros a piece: https://www.thomann.de/nl/adam_hall_6161_schiene.htm?glp=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMI9cHowoHC5gIVRbTtCh2ILwZqEAQYASABEgJyYPD_BwE. They're likely even cheaper at a regular hardware store.

 

 

I've had some serious issues with a case that utilized a commercially available basic/simple busboard with a psu from the same manufacturer and ended up switching to a different case+psu after 2 psu's inexplicably died (the first one died, the company sent me a new psu for free and it lasted about 5 hours before also kicking the bucket). In this case I dealt with a small company that was very helpful and quick to reply but I'd hate to have to deal with a behemoth like behringer in a similar situation even if things ended up not working out. It also meant I couldn't use my case for quite a while which sucks.

Also... it's probably true the margins on things like psu's, cases and even parts to build your own are relatively high but the way I see it is that this also enables small(ish) eurorack brands to exist. They might be buying bulk but relative to other customers the suppliers of electronic components and various parts have it's nothing so I wouldn't be so sure all these companies are getting significant bulk discounts. The plastic bucket/case analogy you're making doesn't make sense to me, the demand for plastic buckets is enormous compared to demand for eurorack cases, and the margin for error is a lot smaller than when you're making a bucket because the rails and modules have to fit neatly so you can't just go to some huge plastics moulding company and put in your order of 100.000 cases and hope there's no irregularities in their production line/process or misadaptation of the design you sent them. That adam hall rail you link there comes without any nuts, I see thomann offers those for 3,30 per 20 excl. shipping (which seems ridiculously expensive to me) so you'd kinda have to add that to the cost to be fair, so that's more like 11,30 for a rail with enough nuts to install anywhere between 6-10 modules. This is assuming you go the sliding nut way, I've no idea what those pre drilled inserts cost.

Designing, developing, building and testing modules costs time and money. People are also quite demanding when it comes to customer support, getting firmware updates etc. so unless you're making some simple tried and true thing like a basic analog filter or vca or whatever there's quite the timeline with possible unforeseen costs if you want to put out some interesting things.

I'm aware of the saying "Those who say it cannot be done shouldn't interrupt those who are doing it" so my apologies for the interruption but apparently I get kind of triggered when people (seemingly) assume everything is super simple and should be much cheaper than it currently is.

                 

    

 

Edited December 20, 2019 by user

[thawkins]

Definitely agreeing with @user here on most points. I guess the economy of scale of the Eurorack standard is still not big enough for being able to ship containers full of the stuff.

I wonder what is the threshold where Behringer will say that OK, this amount is enough to spin up a production line. Probably not below 10k units or something, but how many modular addicts exist in the EU actually?

[Limo]

Also agree with everything @user wrote.
 

Leaving aside his experience with dying PSUs (ouch - I have never had a PSU die in such a short period of time):

Margins being high so small Eurorack brands can exist: no argument there. And they have to be high because even the largest manufacturers are tiny compared to everyone else who is in the electronic devices market. In fact, this was exactly my point. Same with the bucket analogy: make hundreds of thousands of them and they are cheap. Make a thousand and it becomes expensive. Behringer is going to be making, what, 10,000 of them? Hopefully that makes them cheap.

“Designing, developing, building and testing modules costs time and money.”

Indeed - and Behringer doesn’t do a lot of designing. That’s their schtick. And for cases especially there is pretty much no designing to be done anyways. It’s a known problem to solve. All you need to do is manufacture them - which Behringer can do very well - and cheaply.

Finally the rails: I posted the Thomann link to show that even a music store sells them cheaply, Imagine how cheap they are in regular hardware stores where you don’t get the “it’s for music” markup. The screws at Thomann you pointed out are indeed crazy expensive. For that price I can get at least a hundred of them at my local hardware store (which is also expensive - because it’s local - you pay for the convenience). For Behringer they’ll be practically free.

Anyway, like I said, I feel like we agree on most points.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to go down into my basement to fire up my Eurorack system.

Edited December 20, 2019 by rhmilo

[TubularCorporation]

6 hours ago, thawkins said:

Definitely agreeing with @user here on most points. I guess the economy of scale of the Eurorack standard is still not big enough for being able to ship containers full of the stuff.

I wonder what is the threshold where Behringer will say that OK, this amount is enough to spin up a production line. Probably not below 10k units or something, but how many modular addicts exist in the EU actually?

I agree for modules, but a lot of high end cases are a few off the shelf parts put together and rebranded and some of those seem a bit much. But yeah, economies of scale I guess. It just sometimes rubs me the same way as the guy who runs the coffee cart near work.  He's nice and it's a bad area for foot traffic so I get that he wouldn't make enough to support his business if he charged more reasonable prices, but that still doesn't mean that a croissant is worth $6.

 

On PSUs, my downstairs neighbor had a PSU from a pretty well known company fail under pretty gentle use (his rack wasn't even full at the time and he wasn't playing out with it very often yet) and it took out a few modules along the way, although they all ended up being easy repairs.

 

My understanding from the guitar pedal world is that one of the problems with switch mode power supplies vs linear is that one of the most common failure states of linear supplies leaves you with no power but one of the most common failure states of a switch mode supply leaves you with potentially huge overvoltage that can damage things. I don't either of those situations are inherent to the type of power supply (I know for a fact that the regulator in the Juno 6 power supply board - which is linear- passes full DC voltage if it fails, and probably damages so many proprietary ICs that the thing isn't worth repairing, so it's like a ticking time bomb in there), but are inherent to a lot of the most common designs.

 

I could be full of shit though, I knew even less about electronics back when I learned about that stuff than I do now (which still isn't very much). I do know they're more complicated in practice than in theory.

 

Regarding rails, they simply aren't available "in a hardware store" in the USA because that style of rail isn't used for anything here.  We have other styles of aluminum rails that are a lot cheaper but nothing that works with Eurorack. So in the USA you're stuck with synth shop markups or importing and paying the same after shipping costs.

Edited December 20, 2019 by TubularCorporation

[Limo]

^ Wow ... so the “euro” actually means something ... 

Surprising since all of the measurements make more sense in inches ... oh well.

[thawkins]

3 hours ago, rhmilo said:

^ Wow ... so the “euro” actually means something ... 

Surprising since all of the measurements make more sense in inches ... oh well.

My impression is that "rack" comes from standard equipment racks, which are mostly in inches, and "euro" comes from Doepfer or whoever started making standardised 0-5V modules that fit into those equipment racks neatly.

[modey]

So cute to see people saying $15 for rails is expensive. Come to Australia sometime, I'll show you some real exorbitant eurorack prices  

(I paid $63AU for two 84hp rails with threaded inserts, and that was the lowest price I could find)

[TheBro]

Back in Black!!

[andrd]

another one

[YEK]

^ dust brothers and chemical brothers? is that a joke or did the person editing this video fudge up there with the pics

anyways , holy shit. another one.

 

i've decided my first will be the 101 and then the 303.. then maybe a moogy one or poly.

Edited December 31, 2019 by yekker

[TubularCorporation]

The Cat sounds pretty excellent, most interesting one so far IMO.

[Limo]

System 100 (see Namm 2020 thread for video): awesome.

Too bad they had do be dicks and rip off Roland but in principle: yay Behringer for bringing the price of stupidly simple basic modules down to less outrageous levels.

Let Behringer do the boring stuff (cases, utilities) in bulk for cheap and let the boutique people do the fancy stuff.

Only “boutique” manufacturer I kinda feel sorry for is Doepfer. They invented the format, sell basic modules for really not at all extortionate prices and now Behringer is going to eat their lunch. Ah well, such is progress, I guess.

[TubularCorporation]

I've been starting to put together a small Eurorack setup specifically for processing external audio and I think at least the filter module is going to have to go in it, maybe that phaser/delay one  and the active mult/switcher, too.

[modey]

Is it really that hard to design basic generic modules rather than ripping off Roland ones though? 

I thought the remakes were kinda cute at first but it's starting to get ridiculous. 

[Limo]

26 minutes ago, modey said:

Is it really that hard to design basic generic modules rather than ripping off Roland ones though? 

I thought the remakes were kinda cute at first but it's starting to get ridiculous. 

Yeah, this annoys me to. It's not like these are super special designs or something. Just put out cheap mults, mixers, etc and put a generic design on them. No need to do this nudge nudge wink wink thing.

[Silent Member]

I guess the behringer crave, which is a clone of the mother 32 didn't sell all that well because they didn't call it smoother 32 or something, so now they just go all out on the winks.

[thawkins]

Might be because when you search for "System 100" it will now return both Roland and Behringer.

All this new gear in these last few days is giving me the dizzies.

Incredible though how companies can spend that much on new hardware nowadays. Production costs must be way down.

[Guest]

 

[user]

I noticed that my local synth shop significantly dropped the price of the cyclonic 606 and 78 and it seems they’re about 330 eur everywhere now. Wonder if they anticipated the inevitable announcement of this clone. 
The tt78 is still very tempting, the cr78 sound is so lovely... but the tt is such an ugly machine with its altoid tin rounded corners and office supplies store style cyclonic logo. Although the latter can be easily fixed with a sticker I suppose. 
Must be kind of sour for cyclonic they were forced by Roland to redo the design of their clones when they first came out and now behringer is putting out masses of devices that have the exact same look... 

Had a preorder for a td8 but ended up changing the order to a tr3 which should be ready for pickup any time now. I guess it’d be wrong not to get the 606 clone at some point. 

[TheBro]

13 hours ago, plugexpert said:

 

Sounds good and has separate outs. I used to have a 606 but got rid of it.

[Limo]

16 hours ago, plugexpert said:

 

Does anybody else find themselves growing a bit bored with all these Behringer announcements?

I swear they could announce a € 250 CS-80 at this point and I'd just be like "yawn".

 

[d-a-m-o]

1 hour ago, rhmilo said:

Does anybody else find themselves growing a bit bored with all these Behringer announcements?

I swear they could announce a € 250 CS-80 at this point and I'd just be like "yawn".

 

yeah, this.

[psn]

LOL, Korg beat them by a few days...