Behringer today introduced the Surges “Ultimate Liquid Filter” for Eurorack modular systems.
The Behringer Surges is an 8HP voltage-controlled “liquid” multi-mode filter, based on the Mutable Instruments Ripples. Mutable founder Émilie Gillet retired in 2022 and made the company’s designs available as open source via Github.
Like the original, the Behringer Surges is an analog filter with switchable 2-pole and 4-pole slopes, for both band-pass and low-pass outputs. The Surges appears to be a straight clone of the Ripples, with a few compromises in build quality (smaller knobs, no panel washers) to make it more cheaper to manufacture.
Features:
- Voltage controlled multimode filter which provide high-pass, band-pass and low-pass. The slope of the band-pass and low-pass output is switchable (2-pole or 4-pole)
- Based on Mutable Instruments Ripples
- “Liquid” and musical tone coloration reminiscent of SH/Jupiter filters
- Loudness compensation with increased resonance
- Wide frequency range from 18 Hz to 18 kHz
- Purely analog circuitry based on 2164 and 13700 semiconductors
- Eurorack specs: 8 HP, 35 mA +12 V, 35 mA -12 V
Pricing and Availability:
The Behringer Surges is ready to ship, with a street price of $49. There’s typically a month or two lag between Behringer making their shipping announcements and general availability at their Super Partner retailers.
This is gross. They literally copy/pasted based on the font of the numbers of In 1 and In 2…
meaningless panel graphics: pass. first version was so much better. now that there are two ugly panel graphic styles. i’ll stay with OG’s or magpie panels on clones.
Behringer’s panel designs are universally pretty terrible. It seems like that’s a place where they cut corners to keep the prices down.
There are overlays for fixing pretty much all of their Euro format synths, but I wish they’d just hire Grayscale to do their panels so they wouldn’t look like crap and be hard to decipher.
the black panels with white legends are fine with me, and fit in with the System 55 ok – if they’re all bunched together. even the orange (as much as the color sucks in general now) graphic is fairly minimal. this looks like a Transformer toy. sadly, it *was* in black and white before, then they mucked it up. same will happen for the Mixer eurorack module as well i’m suspecting.
i never buy anyone’s modules with superfluous graphics and colorized legends. i’m happy with the plain jane system 55 and 2500 stuff they did. i’ll buy OG MI’s or clones w/magpie panels. calsynth ships good panels on their clones. have four Plaits/Plaidies arriving tomorrow. then i can shift these Brains modules into my kid’s rig (where they belong, lol)
cost reductions are done with platform engineering – using all the same parts for everything to increase parts volume and reduce bolk purchase costs. it’s a winning strategy. you can’t save money by painting panels lol :0)
Good single-color panel designs, like what Grayscale makes, would be more attractive, much easier to read and cheaper to manufacture.
So it’s really annoying that Behringer consistently cheaps out at the design stage. For $49, though, most buyers probably don’t care.
I wonder if Behringer intentionally wants to make gear like this look cheap, so that people are more likely to see it as a inexpensive alternative.
It’s just a lack of taste from the top down.
You only need to look at the Behringer triangle logo to get the idea. Probably was designed by Uli himself an no one has the courage to tell him it’s a very bad logo. Sometimes they get it right (panel wise) because the originals were good. But when they venture into something new, you see that there is no taste or direction. They just don’t have a clue. It’s a company without a conscious branding placement in the market.
The only thing worse than this utter nonsense of a product is this article calling it a clone. It’s a lame ripoff. My critique of your journalism here is an opinion that you could be writing about how it’s a knockoff of something that’s widely available now (out of production fine but you can find them anywhere!) that’s unethical. Many would agree with that.
Also the fact that it’s shit quality and you didn’t even bother to find out if the PCB says mutable on it? Does it meet all of Emile’s requirements for sharing her IP? Did you have any communication with the manufacturer regarding this? I’m sorry synthhead I’ll say this again you and your team really do a great job but this pass that you give B is lazy. If there’s something to write about because B is so newsworthy then why not do so? Instead of just notifying us that it’s available. Garbage company.
We categorize products as clones if they are functionally equivalent to the original, and Surges appears to be just that, a clone based on Mutable Instruments’ open source design.
It does not appear to be a knockoff design, because while Behringer has made some compromises to make it cheaper to manufacture, it’s an official copy, since MI’s design is licensed cc-by-sa-3.0, which allows for the design to be adapted and used commercially.
We have reported in the past when companies do not appear to be following the spirit of open source licenses. That does not appear to be the case here, since Behringer credits Mutable Instruments Ripples as the source of the design.
Beyond that, we are not legal experts and we do not make any attempt to ‘police’ how Behringer or any other company follows licensing requirements.
We do not label any products as ‘ripoffs’, because that’s inherently subjective. We can objectively label designs as clones, knockoffs, reissues, etc, which some readers find to be useful categorizations and others not so much!