behringer vs rives

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.

Shadorne wrote:

"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."

Shadorne, you are making a lot of assumptions here to support your point... Your assumption seems to be that "everyone who uses an EQ is ignorant;" and that because the Behringer is a more powerful corrective tool there is more potential for ignorant users to do more harm than good."

Conversely, although the PARC has less potential to harm a system because it can only cut peaks and not fill in dips, but as such may not be as effective in attaining linear bass in a given room as the Behringer.

Also, the Behringer has an auto EQ mode and a built-in spectrum analyzer so that even dummies can use it... Probably a lot of audiophiles understand that it's not a great idea to boost the bass by more than a few dB.

I know that Rives was thinking about making a model that would allow a small amount of parametric bass boost as well so that it would be more useful in smoothing out small dips in response.

The simple truth is that neither unit will be ideal for every room and situation. But in making the decision on which to use it would be helpful to analyze the bass response in the room in order to determine if the simple cuts the PARC allows would correct the problem(s) to a large enough degree.

Shadorne, yes, you're right about the PARC having greater signal purity and sonic integrity -- and for those with analog sources, or those who are using it not just on the bass, but full range, it is probably the better choice...

That's why I use an analog dbx equalizer in one of my systems. It works well for both my digital and analog sources.