Behringer DEQ2496: Ease of Use

I found it to unacceptably degrade the sound in my system and what it did do to flatten response was not that beneficial in my room. Taking it out, the sound was more natural, smoother and more transparent. I concluded that flat response was beneficial but not that important and adding another dithering stage was likely the problem.

When using the DEQ, it is useful to be aware of one particular point. In digital, it is accepted that dithering can be beneficial but that more than one stage of dithering inevitably degrades the sound. So if you insert the DEQ2496 you add a dithering stage. Redithering in the DAC that follows it will therefore mean it has been done twice. Whether you can avoid that depends a bit on how your DAC works and on matching the bit length of the output of the DEQ and the bit length your DAC uses immediately before conversion to analogue.

FYI, RAM mods these unit. You can find out more about it on their web site.

Tvad, to qualify my comments on the Behringer some more:

Finally, I can detect some negative effects of even mild equalization circuit in my system.

I did, too.

The main problem is when you use the Behringer for frequencies above 150 Hz. Using the PEQ (parametric equalizer) feature alone and in small amounts for the few peaks below 100 Hz worked much better. The Auto-DEQ is fairly useless. Interestingly, inserting the DEQ or PEQ feature for low frequencies introduced some high frequency grain/glare. For use as DAC, I got the best sound in bypass mode.

The DAC is a nice feature too.

I was not impressed with the sound of the DAC.

What transport did you try for the DAC? I tried both a CDP (Audio Aero) and DVD player (Pioneer DV563) as transport (using S/PDIF) and the sound of the Behringer Internal DAC was slow, congested, and lifeless with little resolution.

On the other hand, just driving the Behringer with an Apple laptop and Airport Express (optical out) worked quite well. I got a very quick detailed sound, with maybe a little stringed high-end. In fact the sound was faster and more direct and lifelike and in some ways got even close to the Audio Aero in that combination. And the Prima is no slouch with respect to details. The DAC did not have the body and rich detail of the Prima, but the fast, direct sound was very impressive and enjoyable.

Overall the Behringer seems to be very sensitive to the digital signal it is fed and might prefer even the optical input.

Rene

Everyone commenting about the audio quality of the DEQ2496 should be sure that it is operating at an appropriate signal level...not down in the mud. This signal level is a bit higher than the typical "line level" of consumer audio equipment. 24 bit digital devices don't buy you much if you only tickle the lower ten bits!

I have my system set up so that when I play a CD from beginning to end the peak (maximum) signal level (which the DEQ2496 logs and displays) runs 3 to 6 dB down from CLIP. Average level (the green LEDs) runs about -20 dB most of the time during play. When set up this way, the output of the DEQ2496 needs attenuation for input to my power amps.

Once I realized this requirement there was significant improvement of audio quality.