Editors' Blogs

Apologies for the delay in posting this last part, but what I wanted to say and show took some careful thought. Years ago, at a press conference at NAMM, we were given DVDs that showed tantalizingly brief glimpses of the Zhongshan Eurotec facility nicknamed "Behringer City", serving to raise more questions than they answered. Was this really a classic "sweat shop" environment, or had Uli Behringer actually managed to do something different in the way Chinese factories were run?

That DVD was on my mind as we took the bus across Zhongshan and through several of the large factory complexes that were now becoming familiar to us after our tours of the previous day. The outer trappings of Behringer City were a lot less ostentatious than some others I'd seen; as a result, arriving at the factory was a surprise and I barely had a chance to snap a photo of the sign out front before we were making the turn into the parking lot.

Behringer City is a pretty big place, with buildings on all sides and a large central parking lot with a pedestrian bridge linking two of the largest factory buildings. Signs in English and Chinese were everywhere, and neatly uniformed and crisply polite security guards (with no weapons in evidence) stood watch at the entries to several of the buildings, including at least one with a metal detector. We were quickly divided into four tour groups; Group 1 (the press) was led by Uli Behringer himself, talking to us on a portable loudspeaker he carried slung over one shoulder. We moved swiftly from building to building, ushered along at a rapid pace by Uli and our other guides. At each building, we were greeted by a Behringer employee from Zhongshan, who in carefully practiced English walked us through the various activities on display. 

In one building, we saw speakers being made: Behringer makes all its own speaker cones and winds its own voice coils, even mixing its own paper pulp in different formulations depending on whether speakers are destined for studio monitors, guitar amps, or PA setups. In another building, we had a look at SMD (surface-mounted device) presses, which flash-heat circuit boards, place dozens of tiny components at a time while the solder is soft, and whisk them away to be inspected by teams of intense young ladies with white gloves and aprons alligator-clipped to grounding leads.

In yet another building we got to witness hand-stuffing and testing of circuit boards: a conveyor moves boards along with slow stops and starts, and at each station a worker has a diagram of what the board should look like when it arrives, what it should look like when it leaves that station, and detailed instructions on which components go where. Some workers operated from paper diagrams, while others used LCD display monitors that could be instantly updated. Mr. Behringer explained that this was a new technology, allowing the factory to turn on a dime from manufacturing one product to making another, or to implement a parts change based on service reports coming in from the field. 

In another building we saw woodworkers making guitar bodies and necks and the cases for Behringer's line of home digital pianos. In a separate showroom, we got a quick look at some new designs on their way, including a prototype Les Paul-style single cutaway guitar that may hit stores later in 2009. Barry Cleveland got a slightly extended look inside the building where the Bugera guitar amps were made; we were treated to a young man with a guitar plugging in and testing each amp as it came off the line.

Quality control at the factory was handled by workers located at various points throughout each assembly line, who would inspect and test products as they went by. The goal, Mr. Behringer explained, was to test subsystems at each stage of the game, so that in an ideal world there would not be any need for a full test of the final product before it was boxed. As grueling as the assembly line work was, I think the inspections were probably harder; one girl was standing in front of a powered-up 32-channel mixing console wearing headphones with the gain cranked all the way up, turning each and every knob to listen for crackles. Imagine doing that for a whole day.

Somewhere in the midst of the tour, my camera died, so I had to rely on Behringer's Scott Garside to take some pictures for me -- with luck I'll be able to add those to this blog entry at some future date. I saw small mixers being assembled, studio monitors being cleaned up and tone-tested before packaging, and on a quick side trip into the facility's R&D wing we got some sneak peeks at upcoming new gear (no photos and a promise to keep them under wraps, sorry). My guess is that we didn't see anything particularly earth-shattering by Behringer's standards; this was only one of five separate R&D facilities run by the company around the world, and I'm not sure how open the other four are to visitors.

We also got to see the apartment complex and cafeterias where the employees live and work, a separate building complex guarded by yet more security guards saluting as we walked past. Everywhere we looked, in all the buildings, there were pictures of employees at work, diagrams showing good vs. sloppy work ("see this knob? it's crooked because the solder points weren't properly inserted. Here's what a proper job looks like"), descriptions of quality control philosophies, and at every turn, the Seven Behringer Principles in Chinese and English, always with a huge smiley face.

Finally, we were led into a showroom displaying all of the current Behringer lineup, heard a short speech by Mr. Behringer, and were graciously escorted out to lunch -- another banquet, with a huge Italian gear dealer matching me bite for bite on assorted scary bits of unidentifiable food, with his companions looking on queasily and refusing to try anything. We then had some time to ourselves before the last event of the trip, the official celebration dinner that evening. Some participants walked around in Zhongshan proper, but I took the opportunity to stay in my room and think about what I'd seen.

Was it a "sweat shop"? We'll obviously never know whether what we saw was sanitized or not, but my guess is that the cleanup for the visiting dignitaries, if any, was minimal. There's no doubt that these people were working hard and were very focused, and that the work was repetitive and mind-numbing... but the same could be said of any assembly line in Detroit. This stuff is not intellectually stimulating. It just isn't. We saw our fair share of smiles; the buildings were scrupulously clean; and there was obviously a real sense of relaxation away from the rigidity of the bad old days, with piercings and Western haircuts everywhere. If you add in the fact that 40% of the factories in Zhongshan are currently closed, and the people aren't allowed to leave to seek employment elsewhere in China without government dispensation to travel, the mere fact that these people had jobs was enough to engender quite a bit of loyalty.

I was still pondering this as they loaded us aboard the bus to the dinner party. At this point I'd seen a lot and was digesting a lot, so I wasn't really paying much attention; that may be why I missed the explanation of what exactly would be going on that night. Somehow I missed two important facts: one, that we (as foreign press and dealers who got the word out about Behringer products and helped sell them) were to be the guests of honor at the evening's banquet, and two, that the entire company would be in attendance: all 3000 of them.

So we walked into this banquet hall to be greeted by: a red carpet; a roar of noise from the crowd; flashes going off everywhere; people reaching out to shake our hands as if we were visiting celebrities; and a TV camera crew in our faces, showing our deer-in-headlights expressions to the assembled on a gigantic LCD TV screen set up at the head of the hall, overlooking a gigantic stage.

Naturally, the reception we got paled before what happened when Uli Behringer walked in. You'd have thought Sun Zhongshan himself had risen from the grave to retake control of China. Accompanied by his mother, a lovely lady with a quick wit and ready smile, Mr. Behringer took his seat, took his turn with other speechmakers congratulating the workers on their successes (with a Chinese translator helping him along), and then ordered the feast to begin: a full multi-course Chinese banquet for 3000, with over an hour and a half of entertainment on the huge stage, from singing and dancing to theatrical tricks and martial arts (remember those security guys?), almost all of it done by groups of Behringer City employees who'd been rehearsing in their free time for months for this show. It was an incredible spectacle, and the heartfelt enthusiasm of the crowd was infectious. We all posed for photos with various employees, alone or in groups, and staggered back to the hotel for a quick night's sleep before departure.

The next morning I said my goodbyes and got a limo ride to the ferry port with the folks returning to Japan (Mitani-san and I had a chance to talk once more and exchange best wishes), then took the ferry to the SkyPier, where we were able to go through customs and get to our plane without officially entering/leaving Hong Kong. The flight home was shorter than the flight out and I was a lot more comfortable, and thanks to the International Dateline I arrived in San Francisco before I left Hong Kong, making it home to Denver barely an hour after my departure time.

Since then, I've had a lot to think about, and my discussions with friends about what I'd seen sparked some interesting ideas. One of our writers, an enthusiastic owner of a lot of Behringer gear who proudly defends it against other Chinese-made gear from other manufacturers of different pedigree, noted that my description of stage-by-stage quality control explained a symptom of Behringer gear he'd seen several times in the past: that if a piece worked on the first try, it would work forever, but a small percentage of the time an item would be dead or defective out of the box. If staged QC was replacing a full-on test of a final construct, it's possible that faulty connections between working subsets could result in a dead product. I didn't see enough to comment on whether o r not that was a feasible scenario, but it did get me thinking.

Another writer asked me what Behringer didn't make themselves at the factory and instead brought in from outside. My list wasn't complete, but I know for a fact that Behringer doesn't make its own mic capsules (they're externally sourced from another factory that probably supplies similar products to many of Behringer's competitors), and it doesn't machine its own speaker magnets (that's a specialty operation requiring its own factory). But as much as possible the company does try to work with parts it makes itself... I mean, mixing your own speaker paper pulp?

Another question I got a lot was, "Do you feel differently about Behringer products after having had the tour?" And my answer to that is a resounding no. I have no strong prejudice toward or against Behringer gear, as evidenced by my reviews of Behringer products over the years: it's inexpensive, it generally works well, and it's up to the consumer (with a little help from us) to understand what he does and doesn't get for his money. While I don't believe that everything in the Behringer lineup is double the quality of its competition for half the price, I also don't believe that it's all substandard crap that will explode, disintegrate, or contract bird flu the minute you plug it in. It's built to a price point and it does its job, and frankly it allows a lot of beginners and budget-minded recording types to do things they couldn't afford to do otherwise. That opinion hasn't changed since seeing the conditions under which it's made.

It will take me a long time, though, to forget all those smiling faces at the banquet, all those people who were just so damn happy to have jobs where they were reasonably well treated and could do their work with a measure of dignity and pride. That's something you can't really put a price tag on.