Feature:
Typical Behringer feature-richness.
Quality:
Not bad. The principal moving parts, the gain knobs, are a bit flimsy, have excessive play, and are non-uniform in stiffness, suggesting some problems with the quality of build and/or materials.
The signal LEDs do a funky little dance when phantom power is switched on or off; this makes me wonder a bit about the quality and consistency of the electronics.
The connectors seem okay, although I don't know how many plug/unplug cycles they could stand.
Overall, not something I would be likely to take on the road. Pity, since it's not really suitable for critical applications in a studio either.
Value:
For what it does, the price is pretty good. If price is more important than high fidelity and long life, this might be a good choice.
Desirability:
Behringer doesn't generally go for sex appeal. This item is in that "get the job done cheaply" category.
Sound:
This is basically two units in one. On the input side, it's quite usable. The preamps are nothing to write home about, but are adequate for stage use. It might also be useful in a studio setting if you need a bunch of pres for miking, say a drum kit, and quantity is more important than quality. You probably don't want to run your vocal mic through these.
On the output side, again nothing stellar, but adequate for non-critical applications. My particular unit exhibits some really nasty high-frequency aliasing that renders it completely unsuitable for critical listening. I don't know if this is a design problem, or if it's specific to my unit. [If you have one of these, try running pure sine waves through it at, say, 10k, 12.5k, 16k and 20k. If your unit has the problem that mine does, this test will make it very obvious.]
I have this unit connected to the ADAT in/out on a Creamware SCOPE card. A/Bing the Behringer against the AD/DA converters on the SCOPE's line in/out makes it pretty clear that Creamware's converters are vastly superior. So much so that I don't really use the Behringer unless I'm really tight on I/O.
Ease of Use:
Pretty straightforward -- not a lot you can do wrong. It would be nice if the +4 and -10 positions on the gain controls were detented, or if there were some other way (pushbutton or whatever) to lock it to those settings.
It loses some points for the all-or-none phantom power, as well as for the fact that the phantom switch could easily be pressed accidentally by a fat finger on its way to the power switch.
Support:
No experience.
Overall:
The bottom line is that I basically don't use it. I bought it for studio use, basically to take advantage of the ADAT I/O on my sound card and move the AD/DA conversion out of the noisy computer. Unfortunately, the degradation of sound quality relative to the analog IOs on my high-end sound card is just a bit too severe to be useful to me.
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