This is a review and detailed measurements of the Behringer DEQ2496 Ultracurve "2-channel Equalizer and Mastering Processor." It was kindly loaned to me for testing from a member and has a retail cost of US $645 but I see it discounted to US $429. For those of you frustrated with my lead times, this poor owner has been waiting for a year for this review! Yes, shameful on my part. Testing these specialized products is more of an unknown and I tend to procrastinate in getting them done.
Anyway this is a pro product and "looks the part" as our British brothers would say:
Don't expect fancy OLED displays and such. You get a low contrast orange display (a bit better in person than above). There is a ton of complexity here and navigation is not intuitive using no less than three separate dials and three soft buttons. I muddled my way through it but it is possible I did not get it completely right. Here is the back panel:
You have the ability to feed it digital data and have balanced output at two different levels (indicated by that push button). Or go analog in and out in which case the signal is digitized, processed and then converted back to analog. I tested both modes.
Note that my review is limited to performance of the product with respect to its input and output. I cannot review the functionality for which you should seek other reviews. Nor can I test the millions of combination of various processing modes.
Behringer DEQ2496 Ultracurve DAC Measurements
Let's feed the unit balanced digital input ("AES") and see what comes out of the XLR analog output:
As noted, this is in high output mode as it should be for XLR output. If I feed the default 0 dBFS (full amplitude digital) to it, the output shoots above 11 volts and clips. Strangely, there is no volume control on this unit so the only way I could adjust the output was to reduce the digital input as you see. I ran a sweep though for both output levels to see performance at different output levels:
For output to consumer devices, best performance is at just 0.8 volts which is not optimal. Switching to full output level remedies that producing optimal output at 4 volts.
Intermodulation shows early saturation but this is due to fixed high output voltage:
If I could set the output to 4 volts, the knee for the curve would be much farther to the right.
Last test I ran on the DAC was linearity which looked pretty good:
Behringer DEQ2496 Ultracurve Analog In Measurements
To make sure none of the processing was impacting the performance, I enabled the bypass mode and got this result:
This is stunningly good of course. But I suspect it is completely bypassing ADC and DAC. Turning on the pipeline but not adjusting anything gives the true performance:
The ADC is basically costing us a couple of dBs which makes sense.
Signal to noise ratio is decent for intended use:
ADC/processing sample rate is programmable. Using the default 96 kHz produces this:
Testing distortion relative to output level produces this measurement:
While a lot more expensive, we see that the Minidsp DDRC-88 outperforms the DEQ2496.
Finally, I ran the distortion relative to frequency and was disappointed by the results:
Some rise with frequency is to be expected but nothing this steep. In some sense than our 1 kHz tests resemble the best case situation.
Conclusions
For the intended pro/live sound, the Behringer DEQ2496 does the job as it likely has lower distortion than any pro amp you use. For audiophile use though, it only manages to get 15 to 16 bits of clean dynamic range relative to distortion. That does the job but I hope we strive for better.
Overall I am neutral on Behringer DEQ2496. Performance could have been worse so for the price and application, it seems to be OK.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any kind donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Anyway this is a pro product and "looks the part" as our British brothers would say:
Don't expect fancy OLED displays and such. You get a low contrast orange display (a bit better in person than above). There is a ton of complexity here and navigation is not intuitive using no less than three separate dials and three soft buttons. I muddled my way through it but it is possible I did not get it completely right. Here is the back panel:
You have the ability to feed it digital data and have balanced output at two different levels (indicated by that push button). Or go analog in and out in which case the signal is digitized, processed and then converted back to analog. I tested both modes.
Note that my review is limited to performance of the product with respect to its input and output. I cannot review the functionality for which you should seek other reviews. Nor can I test the millions of combination of various processing modes.
Behringer DEQ2496 Ultracurve DAC Measurements
Let's feed the unit balanced digital input ("AES") and see what comes out of the XLR analog output:
As noted, this is in high output mode as it should be for XLR output. If I feed the default 0 dBFS (full amplitude digital) to it, the output shoots above 11 volts and clips. Strangely, there is no volume control on this unit so the only way I could adjust the output was to reduce the digital input as you see. I ran a sweep though for both output levels to see performance at different output levels:
For output to consumer devices, best performance is at just 0.8 volts which is not optimal. Switching to full output level remedies that producing optimal output at 4 volts.
Intermodulation shows early saturation but this is due to fixed high output voltage:
If I could set the output to 4 volts, the knee for the curve would be much farther to the right.
Last test I ran on the DAC was linearity which looked pretty good:
Behringer DEQ2496 Ultracurve Analog In Measurements
To make sure none of the processing was impacting the performance, I enabled the bypass mode and got this result:
This is stunningly good of course. But I suspect it is completely bypassing ADC and DAC. Turning on the pipeline but not adjusting anything gives the true performance:
The ADC is basically costing us a couple of dBs which makes sense.
Signal to noise ratio is decent for intended use:
ADC/processing sample rate is programmable. Using the default 96 kHz produces this:
Testing distortion relative to output level produces this measurement:
While a lot more expensive, we see that the Minidsp DDRC-88 outperforms the DEQ2496.
Finally, I ran the distortion relative to frequency and was disappointed by the results:
Some rise with frequency is to be expected but nothing this steep. In some sense than our 1 kHz tests resemble the best case situation.
Conclusions
For the intended pro/live sound, the Behringer DEQ2496 does the job as it likely has lower distortion than any pro amp you use. For audiophile use though, it only manages to get 15 to 16 bits of clean dynamic range relative to distortion. That does the job but I hope we strive for better.
Overall I am neutral on Behringer DEQ2496. Performance could have been worse so for the price and application, it seems to be OK.
-----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Appreciate any kind donations using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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