Behringer DEQ2496: Ease of Use

The Behringer DEQ2496 is a great little box for the money. A friend of mind borrowed me his for 6 weeks and I will surely get one for myself.

It is not too difficult to use, but then I have a Physics Ph.D. :). It has many options and trying all out will take its time. What I enjoy most is the capability to do real time room measurement. This really helps in setting up speakers and integrating a sub. Also, it works well as a decent DAC.

One comment though: An equalizer is no substitute for room treatments. Room treatment will treat standing waves and reflections for listening anywhere in the room. An equalizer cannot compensate for listening positions or speakers placed a standing wave node. Also, ideally the equalizer will only correct the response for one particular seating position.

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

Well worth it for measurements and as analyzer for room treatment. The DAC is a nice feature too.

Rene

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