That’s what enables us to build a bigger company across different, dynamic cells.”
The Behringer team was led
by Dr Thomas Zint, in Germany. “He’s the chief architect behind the X32, writing a lot of the code and designing much of the feature set,” says Lakoumentas. From Midas, Ian Shanahan played a pivotal role: he is human interface designer at Music Group’s new R&D centre in Manchester, and was formerly a GUI design engineer at Midas- Klark Teknik. The work was carried out between the UK and Germany, with Zint visiting both Manchester and Kidderminster, and Shanahan and others collaborating in Germany.
Mixers sold by Behringer
upgraded components! There are differences between the PRO9 preamp and the X32, but we believe that this is the first time that anyone has delivered this kind of precision in a mic preamp at this price level. From our perspective it really is revolutionary.” It had to be something of a
compromise, with the two teams slaving over the molecular details to find out exactly where the trade-offs should be, but there’s
enough Midas DNA in the result to make the X32 a genuine spin- off. “Even to highly professional users, the differences are subtle enough to be practically transparent,” states Lakoumentas. “It’s almost confusing that the price point is so low, because it suggests a different value proposition. In a way it masks how amazingly good this product is on a technical level. Yes, there may have been some compromise on
the preamps, but we use exactly the same converters in the X32 as we do in the PRO9. There are no better converters on the market; with our buying power we pay a lot less for them than most other manufacturers. There is no other product anywhere near this category that has the same sonic performance.” This is how the scale of Behringer’s operation can directly apply the economies of scale necessary to donate cost-savings
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to otherwise out-of-reach components: something that a boutique manufacturer simply could not afford and something that a large conglomerate, without being in possession of a premium brand, simply could not apply. Since the X32, of course, Music Group has announced the acquisition of Turbosound, so the intentions are clear. Expect more of the same alchemy, only louder. n www.behringer.com
“We believe that this is the first time that anyone has delivered this kind of
precision in a mic preamp at this price level”
Costa Lakoumentas, Music Group
“It wasn’t just about the
preamps,” continues Lakoumentas. “One of the most technically difficult aspects was implementation of the AES50 network, something perfected at Kidderminster and new to the Behringer team. That said, it is the preamps that are getting people excited. Behringer has been making mixers for a long time, and we know how to make a fundamentally good mic preamp with transparency, lots of dynamic range, an extremely low noise floor, low distortion and all of those measures. In fact, we’ve sold over 10.5 million mixers. “However, the preamp is one
of the hallmarks of the Midas brand. Without lifting the kimono too much, there are proprietary techniques that make the Midas design unique – perfectly phase-coherent. When you’re building a $100,000 console, you can afford a few