Behringer: Highly Rated Speakers, Stupid Hook-Up Design, and Non-Existent Customer Relations

Gary North

Oct. 24, 2009

I bought a pair of Behringer 2030P TRUTH speakers this week. At $120 a pair, they are a bargain.

I use them in a 7-speaker home theater set-up, along with a pair of standing Boston Acoustic speakers that are over 20 years old. The Behringers replace a pair of ancient BA bookshelf speakers, one of which had died.

I don't know if they are great speakers or not. They are not primary speakers. But for around $100, they sound fine.

They have a minor problem. The speaker cable hook-up slots are really, truly stupid. Bonehead stupid. The slot has a vertical pole in the middle. So, you cannot insert the wire and twist down the nub. The pole forces you to squish the speaker wire around the pole. I have never seen anything this utterly stupid in 53 years of buying speakers.

Then there was the registration card. It is in an Asian script. There is no address. There is no place for a stamp. Is it the registration card? I found no other card.

When I went to Behringer's site to send an email with a warning, I found that there is no email option on the site. There is no customer relations department. There is no sales department. There is no webmaster-alert email. This announces: "Go away, customer. Just send us your money."

The company was started in Germany in 1989, now makes the products in China, and is headquartered in Monaco, a tiny tax haven. Its customer relations department might as well be in North Korea.