Yeah.. You cant REALLY know the answers to these things until you are using and hearing the gear your self. Advice is just that.....advice. Some will be based on real-life experience, some will be based on hearsay generated by opinions expressed on pages like these. You have to simply weed through all of it and make the decision yourself. Any snap decisions will only become what they are after the fact and then you'll know. Take your time and research research research.

Davedog has it right, opinions are plentiful and many not founded on anything solid. I can give you some input on EMU since I actually own and use an EMU 1616M PCI. I've had it for some 5 months and have had no problems with it whatsoever, very stable, works great. Can't really say anything about other EMU products though.

My brother is a sound engineer and uses the Firebox at home, and he is quite happy with that one as well (uses it with a Mac).

As for the other stuff, I have no personal experience of either Behringer or ESP, so I won't add to the "unfounded advice pile". ;-)

HTH

Thanks for the replies guys. I have pretty much decided on the firebox, even though I could not find a lot of people who have heard of it. But I've only heard good things from the ones who have, so hopefully...

What I meant to say about the conflicting advice is that not only do people have different opinions, but they are also influenced by a lot of people without knowing it, like their music school. A friend of mine has told me their teacher told them that he bans anything by Behringer, but someone from another school said their teacher recommends it. And this is all because sponsorships, equipment donations etc;

Distiple wrote: A friend of mine has told me their teacher told them that he bans anything by Behringer, but someone from another school said their teacher recommends it. And this is all because sponsorships, equipment donations etc;

The reason a lot of people ban stuff from B***inger (and the reason I won't even type their full name...more on that below) is because of the fact that they have done some rather unethical things in the past. A prime example is their complete and total reverse engineering of Mackie products. Even though Mackie has an international copyright on their circuit board layouts, speaker components, etc... B***inger stole those designs and produced the exact same product. The only difference is they used lower quality parts (think 20% tolerances versus the 5% or less on Mackie gear) and paid Chinese children very little money to make it for them.

The reason I won't even spell out their name on this site (nor will many others) is quite simple. This site is indexed quite well on most major search engines (kudos Chris!) I don't want ANYONE coming across this site when they search for that abomination of a company! To me, even their name is a stain.

But hey.......that's just me. I also refuse to shop at Wa*mart!
:roll:

Cheers -

J.

To me the biggest reasons to be wary of Behringer equipment are the use of cheap parts, quality control, and service. I've bought a few of their pieces in my day and sold all of them off as "penny wise, pound foolish" purchases.

Everyone has to make their own decisions on this, but I don't share the "principled" objections to the company. I have worked with a lot of engineers, and stopped trying to make sense of intellectual property law a long time ago. IP is what the law says it is, not what I think it should be. All engineers "reverse engineer" to one degree or another. And most of what Behringer makes is pretty darned basic technology. And with just about every major brand having a line manufactured in China, I think its kind of silly to single out Behringer.

I know this doesn't make your decision easier, but I'd just focus on quality, compatibility, and service and let the lawyers worry about the other stuff. As Dave says, research. Try to talk to people in your area who will let you see the stuff in action and try it out.

And - I know that this is the toughest advice - save your pennies, wait until you can buy better gear. It may seem that there are just as many arguments about gear a notch or two up the ladder, but they are really about much finer points than the low end gear. It doesn't make it easier to make a decision - just makes "bad" decisions easier to live with.

Distiple wrote: A friend of mine has told me their teacher told them that he bans anything by Behringer, but someone from another school said their teacher recommends it. And this is all because sponsorships, equipment donations etc;

yeah opinions are like....uh.... 57's.... yeah thats the ticket...

instructor #1 is in all likelyhood one of the ethical types...(i'm with cucoooo on this) the later is well... perhaps he's misinformed or your bud is...

if ya want to start a flame war around here you might want to ask about pirated software.... it's the same diff... dont do cracks in your hardware or software...