behringer vs rives

Someone said behringer 2496 is 1/6 not 1/3 octave. is this important?

In a nutshell, the Behringer is a much more powerful room acoustics shaping tool, but from what I gather is not all that transparent when inserted into a high-end system. However, if you use it on your speaker's bass section only, it could work out very well.

The Rives Parc if I recall correctly has 3 parametric bands that can cut bass peaks (but not boost the dips). So it is somewhat limited in its ability to fix room problems, but is a very transparent sounding piece of gear. And oh yeah... it costs a heckofalot more than a Behringer.

The Behringer's circuitry is digital, while the PARC uses high-quality analog circuitry.

Rives is Analog whilst Behringer does things in the digital domain. The Behringer is a full paramteric equalizer it will overwhelm most people when trying to set it up and understand the width of filters according to Q etc. Behringer is better suited to geeks who spend hours reading and studying a manual....

The Rives Parc if I recall correctly has 3 parametric bands that can cut bass peaks (but not boost the dips).

Exactly....it is idiot proof. It will not ruin your sound like you can very easily do with a full fledged EQ. For example....you should NEVER boost room nulls with your EQ...this is bad....but you need to be quite knowledgeable about how audio equipment works to not make this fundamental mistake. This is where Rives come in....a product that will do as much for the room modes as you can practically do WITHOUT the risk of messing it up through ignorance.