I’ve never seen a thing about Uli with music posted or some evidentiary trail of past works. I could see it as a curiosity but I think the point was more the guy just grew up loving synths and he likes making money obviously.
So here we are.
The bogeyman thing is surely they’ve had a historical rep for knock offs and iffy builds. Some say they had no issues and whatever they bought performed and held up fine for the cost. Then the cloning of out of copyright circuits, full designs and even cosmetic styles and panel livery just set off the people who have already hated Behringers for 10-20 years.
And I’d add to that you might notice an odd pattern in the most vehement anti Uli folks. They seem to have have zero issue with indie and tiny firms cloning Moog, Roland, OB and ARP. If it’s something like AJH Moog clones (or Moon or dot com in 500 format clones) in euro rack there’s not a peep of dissent.
Then they shift it to well it’s not the cloning itself it’s that it’s a multi billion dollar interest doing it, so = evil, case closed in their minds.
The recent TD-3 black or whatever name ascribed, that situation gets more grey and blurry. Behringer was in talks with the DevilFish mod creator to pay for his design and just spit out the boards at levels of production previously unimaginable. They offered him a fraction of a percentage point, he said no, they said whatever we will just do it anyway.
So that detour is I think a bit more valid a debate to have or take issue with. In the other cases he’s cloning things that are out of copyright that were owned by firms who mostly refused to ever reissue under any circumstance. Of course excepting the Korg and ARP reissues. But even those are made with David Friend from ARP as a consultant and sharing on the profits. It’s not due to the fact Mr. Friend owns the designs, they are out of copyright.
And as crazy as it seems the 50 number is pretty real once you start adding up all the leaks, trolling with a smile suggestions in their online marketing like IG and saying open ended suggestive things on forums, posed as ‘what would you think if...’ queries.
I hope they do more originals as it’s just more variety and the Neutron is a great piece of kit. I feel like some of the questions people raise are valid, but I don’t feel it’s quite the black and white all good/all evil dichotomy so many are framing it as in a monolithic way.