I worked at a stereo repair/audiophile hand-holding outfit, and we had a test for miniature electrolytic caps we bought in bulk: weigh them. We had an analytical scale that could weigh the difference between Fairy dreams and nightmares; we kept the heaviest 1/3, threw the rest out. The capacitors, not the Fairies! Our theory was that a cap that weighed 2/3 of what it's buddies did is likely already dried out.

Searching Eurorack UB1202 on google, this video now appears on the front page of search results. Well done

I'm a professional DJ and owned the Behringer XENYX X1222USB mixer, for exactly 2 years, right until I started to get noise and channel dropouts. A month after buying mine, a musician friend bought the exact same model and used it for... yes, you guessed correctly - 2 years! Exactly the same problem - noise and channel dropouts. Built-in obsolescence is a real thing it seems!

I show the date of introduction for the UB1202 as 2005... Wikipedia has the cap plague ending around 2007... so this could be a real cap-plague piece. Suspicious that none of them popped their seals.

“There’s no reason for them to go bad in such a short amount of time” Behringer has consistently pumped out too-good-to-be-true products like this for at least a decade and a half now lmao

You can repurpose all those Chinese capacitors as resistors!

capacitors are the perfect components to build planned-obsolete devices. Manufacturers choose the brand based on the required "timing".

Guilty by Association ? LOL Guilty of Living longer then expected.

I know of an Australian manufacturer of specialised equipment that farmed out some production to China of a product which was normally manufactured locally. Within 6 months to a year they started getting failures - up to 50%. Since the equipment had special warranties and required an electrician to replace it they had to absorb all the replacement costs involved. A very expensive lesson due to poor quality components being substituted in China.

I used to work in the pro audio biz and Behringer always had a reputation for ripping off other companies' successful products (yours is a copy of a Mackie 1202) and building them as cheaply as possible. Not surprised at all about the crappy caps!

I had a very similar problem with a Behringer XENYX 1202FX and re-capping resolved the issue. I am not sure if I would have considered doing that without seeing this video so thank you very much!

Even though the caps test as "good", I'd still replace them with nice quality ones for good measure. Electrolytic capacitors are the "secret sauce" for planned obsolescence. I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturers choose the quality to match how long they want the device to last before someone has to buy another one.

I changed hundreds of bad electrolytic caps on Dell motherboards many years ago. No idea if it was true, but the story was that the cap manufacturer hd been sold counterfeit electrolyte. Another bit of kit I had to replace lots of bad caps on was Thompson TV 1530 cameras. We had some when they were very new and after not too long they began developing a fascinating array of faults. After a few sessions of diagnosis and repair, often complicated by their use of thick film hybrid modules which were effectively “black boxes”, we started to realise almost every fault was caused by bad 0.1UF chip capacitors. From then on, we used to play “spot the cap” and analysis of the circuit would usually get us to the culprit pretty quickly.

Its so interesting that the sound made from smooth lines is so harsh while that of the "filigreed" shapes sound so pleasant. I understand why, but its a great demonstration of the complexity of music.

Had a problem with my 1202 and the repair tech I've used over the years said that repairing it would probably cost more than buying a new one as they go for about $120. Another example of our intentionally designed throw-away culture, a culture that is devastating the planet.

Oh my. This is why many sound engineers have "no Behringer" in their Technical Riders ...

Blindfolded! That made my night.

Behringer with the withe noise generator in every product xD

I love the contrast the title 'Modern Tech Fails" gives with all the retro tech you have on your channel.

I had missed your original oscilloscope music video, so I watched it (thanks for the link). Holy cow! As a musician and geek, I really enjoyed it. Now I want to get his album, set up my scopes, and watch it while stoned!

Good on you for doing the repair. I threw mine away as for the money it just isn't worth it. But if you've got the time and it's something you enjoy, cool!

When you click on the video because you have the same mixer, I’m like no please say it’s not so, I love Behringer and there cheap knock offs but this gave me some knowledge of the cheap crap they use

I have an old Behringer Eurodesk MX8000 from the end of the 90's and it works flawless. Different song for todays Behringer.

A reminder that being a Chinese capacitor does not make it a bad capacitor. The issue here is Behringer specifying the cheapest of the cheap caps. Be careful saying “Chinese caps are bad”. Nichicon and Rubycon make “bad” caps too if you buy their 85C 1000hr caps and put them in an environment they weren’t intended for.

I really like the soft relay switching noise that your HP LCR meter makes.

To the oscilloscope Music demo: You should try to find a DC coupled (or other way round: not AC coupled) audio source. This REALLY sharpens up everything and provides signals in the way oscilloscope music should look like on the screen as intended by the creator.

Since it's founding, Behringer has always been a company that copies from other manufacturers and aims its products to budget-minded individuals who are looking for the same features you would otherwise have to pay a premium for. Behringer claims to be conceived in Germany, but was one of the first companies to dedicate all of its production in China. As a result they've encountered numerous legal battles with other companies over issues with patents and copyrights. Eventually, they've bought out other professional-grade companies and have, in my opinion, done an injustice to the names these new products are built on. Quality wise, I've always thought of Behringer as the European equivalent of Peavey; it may not sound the best, but it gets the job done.

Wow, I didn't know the fail rate for the different temp ratings was SO dramatic! I think I'll stop pinching pennies. Thanks, mate!

I have been using a small Beheringer mixer on my keys rig since 2008. Played hundreds of gigs and the thing worked perfect right up to lockdown. hopefully back next year.

I like your synthesizer sounds! I’m gonna keep my eyes out for those CRTs for doing that oscilloscope music with, so I hope that’s a pretty easy feat to accomplish. THANKS A LOT for explaining those ratings, as now I feel oh so much more understanding of the info printed on my electrolytic caps. It might seem second nature to someone else, but I never bothered to read any further than the voltage and farad values, and I never asked what all else it’s telling me! So big THANKS there, that’s valuable info to remember.

I got a second hand behringer xenyx 1222fx mixer for a great price it was only 2 or 3 years old and it blew up a few days after i bought it from a person. But i fixed it for few bucks i just replaced switching transistor/ic , rectifier and optocoupler in the power supply. Now it works perfectly. Only letdown of that mixer was a freaking switching power supply. If it blows again i am going to make external power supply with proper transformers and regulators.

All the capacitor tests makes me wanna hear Mr. Carlson's voice :)

Herr Bert from the furure appreciates the repair video. His Behringer will break eventually, too

That 603 scope is a real thing of beauty. I have an old Eurorack 1602 Mixer that I've had since the late 90's and it's served me well - still going strong, albeit with a couple of scratchy pots.

Oh yeah, just resurrected large Samsung monitor thrown away by a neighbor. Used Nichicon for the re-capping, which basically doubled price of the device on the market right now :) (nobody cares I guess)

I love the tear down of the good and bad caps

Yes Marc, you have to remove ALL the knobs....

I repaired old old AMPEX tape recorder by replacing all the power supply caps. I don't have the equipment to do this level of checking. It makes me think I should replace all the caps. It works now with no hum, so maybe leave it as is. What was funny was the power supply push-pull tubes had to be replaced. I replaced them with Russian tubes as they had the best reputation for modern replacement tubs. The punch line is that this particular recorder was used by the US Navy to record diplomatic parties during the Cold War.

I just got rid of my digital radio with a similar problem and i realized i did not check other caps after I changed filter caps :(

caps are the bain of my old computer collection as well!

Back in high school, I did an internship in one of their contract repair centers in Germany and had to deal with one of these. About 2 mins after plugging it in, the level indicators would start flashing and it would start buzzing like crazy. Quality gear.

Yay! Another from Marc! I have to deal with these mixers all the time... can't wait to see what's up! Thanks! [Yep -- I've had to replace power supply caps in Behringer mixers. Not a big surprise. I wonder how many big names rebrand these devices, there are many with the exact form factor, just different case/hardware.] Best Lissajous curves I've ever seen.

Wow, I had the same mixer and it failed in the exact same way. Was appalled by the power supply design having a bunch of caps right next to the linear regulators with no cooling.

Had the smaller version of this giving off the magic smoke on the regulators. Replaced those, new smoke comes out. Now that I have seen that it can be any/all of the numerous caps, I will just harvest the knobs and trash the thing. Thanks!

Hah, I have this exact same mixer and it was never great and became unusably noisy after not all that much usage... Upgraded a long time ago, but kind of tempted to re-cap it now and revive it!

I have a Behringer Xenyx 1002B, and I noticed that the noise floor got higher over the past few years. Thanks for the tip, I might order a kit for it, keep it up!

Hi sir i am from indonesia, i am excited with your tool, make me fool about components electronic, i am technician to, must be learn with your chanel, tank you so much.

I have absolutley no idea what you are talking about, but I like it!

Спасибо за великолепные музыкальные эффекты. Да и видео самого ремонта всегда завораживают.

Stark, irrefutable evidence of the difference between GOOD equipment made by manufacturers who CARE about quality and are not afraid to CHARGE THE CONSUMER the little extra that GOOD quality will cost. I guess my next mixer will be a Yamaha, or similar. One can remain hopeful that they will source high grade components for their designs.

Ah Behringer. I immediately knew where this was going as soon as I read the name.

I just finished replacing the caps in my Sanyo Walkman. Some of them were completely dead, but almost all of them were more than 20% out of spec, and had a high ESR. Portable electronics from the 80s/90s seem to be vulnerable to bad caps, I suppose from the heat in the small enclosures. But I agree with you that blanket replacing of caps should not be they way you repair things. In fact, the walkman also had a bad volume switch, and that took some time to diagnose. It was an unusual volume knob with both left and right actuation. One of the two sides was tied into the motor circuit.

Cathartic vids by Marc - recapping meditation is a ‘thing’ 🧘🏻‍♂️

I’ve had two Behringer mixers, one failed because I plugged it into 240V... maybe I killed the power adapter but I didn’t have a way to check. The other still works, but I did manage to zap its USB port with a fake Apple plug. Both cost $100 so I can’t bring myself to care.

At first I thought that was some kind if micro impact wrench. My mind was like.. what the hell? lol.. oh.. it's the loud pump.

"It's going to be pretty annoying if we have to remove all these knobs." Exactly what I said when I had to replace boards on a 32 channel Yamaha console. 17 knobs and a fader per input, I think I only replaced the boards for 16 channels. A nightmare...

I think that the moral of the story here is this. Don't buy Behringer's garbage. I bought a Xenyx Q802 USB about a decade ago. The left channel wasn't working so I opened it to see if it was something relatively easy to fix. Lowe and behold there's a nut from one of the ¼" Jack's wedged up against the left output grounding it to the neighboring ground pin of a nearby jack. I have a picture of it as I discovered it if you're interested. This was fortuitous because one of the nuts they used was cross threaded so it served as a replacement for the fouled one. That's not even to mention the PA speakers where I discovered that they had repaired some miss-cut port holes by filling it up with hot glue. I found this as I was replacing blown drivers which were rated at about a quarter of the power rating on the cabinet. The iNuke DSP 3000 I got from them came with the wires of the power switch disconnected internally. There was a matching amp which was missing it's fuse. I didn't buy them used. They came that way new. What bothered me most was the 250 watt drivers in a 2k watt cabinet and not even in series with the other one in the same cabinet. I'll never buy Behringer's product again. Id suggest Yamaha or Mackie for about the same price. You'll be much happier with either of those.

Yes, but can your oscilloscope music spell "Techmoan" ?

I also have the UB1202 and it failed after about two years. Two OP amps had gone south so I had no sound output. Quite easy fix and it has been working since. Only cost me the price of the OP amps as I did the repair myself. This was 15 years ago so maybe I should replace the caps. :)

Awsome video. Loved the visualization of sound.

Speaking of the importance of quality caps, I took the main filtering caps out of a 1996 Alpine V12 car amplifier, they are alpine branded 50v 5600uf snap-in caps and one has a v loss of 1.3% still has 5643uf and an esr of .02, the other has a v loss of 1.2% 5821uf and an esr of .03. They have outlived most of the other components on the amp.

That failure rate is just crazy. How can they stay in business? Edit: I'm talking about the capacitor company... If their caps are so bad, how can they manage to sell them?

Genuine Crapacitors. They appeared on much more expensive equipment too.

I have a Xenyx 10 channel I bought in 2008, used it almost everyday since then with no issues at all... except I did clean the main slider once to get dust and dirt out.

Loving your occiliscope music

Thankyou for all the wonderful content Curiousmarc!!! 👍

Oh wow! I feel your pain. All those capacitors, well at least you shouldn't have any more problems any time soon!

The main filter cap failed on my friend's Behringer MX602A mixer. He said, "Here, it's yours". I replaced it with a decent Japanese cap for a couple bucks. Still going strong 10 years later.

caps in such low power devices wont bulge, to make them bulge they need to get hot. when their esr increases, they lose more energy to heat, which evaporates / boils the electrolyte causing them to bulge, dry out and esr increase even more. usually they wont leak either, they just dry out over time. even new old stock caps from this era might be bad allready without even seeing a second of use.

the oscope music visualization is so cool!!! thanks for posting such neat content!

Now THATS a BAD filter - WOW! I just changed 4 Xunda caps in my (new to me) Eurorack "UB2442FX-PRO" power supply. This time all 4 have burst vents. (2 25v 1000uf and 2 16v 470 uf). This replaced a Fostex mixer so it's a step up; but I want to replace all the caps before something else goes wrong.

On a related note my Tektronix TDS-220 scope from over 20 years ago is working fine with no repairs of any kind. It is possible to build quality, but price points seem to be the norm instead. To date it, it supports hardcopy printout directly to Epson 9 or 24 pin dot matrix printers using a centronics parallel port with the optional communications module. Will also print to a Thinkjet, Deskjet, or original Laserjet by HP, if you still have one. This is pre USB, so no saving traces to a thumb drive.

Great content and information. Might I suggest a COB LED for zooming in on the capacitor details. This would show a better image on camera and no shadows on the images. Keep the videos coming.

theres a good reason why a lot of my muso mates and myself dont like behringer

3:15 just a side note, one was a 7915. The 78xx series is positive voltage regulator and the 79xx series is negative

Yeah, I bought a condo that was 10 years old, but never occupied. The oven still had the manuals and styrofoam in it, but the control board failed and the mfr (high end appliance) had no replacement boards anymore. It was... the electrolytics. Every single one was bad. All cheap, cheap, cheap, caps too. Replaced them all, restored the board. Mid 2000's era appliance. That was the era of bad capacitor manufacturing.

Makes me want to take apart my Behringer and replace all the caps in advance...

I only use Panasonic 10,000 hour larger sized EB or FM (low ESR applications) when electrolytics are necessary in my designs. Everything 47uF and under is film or ceramic.

Hmmmm and they seem so attractively priced too!!! - I use 2 of the other Behringer models - one is problematic with it's USB and the other introduces quite a bit of hum into my audio - that's a lot of capacitors to remove and check/replace. Great video and probably a look into the future for one of my mixers.

Been trying to get oscilloscope music running on my Picoscope but not real time enough - I'll have to get my old analogue scope out.... Good point on capacitors. Steer clear of unknowns. I also didn't realise that fake components were such an issue in the market.

Bought one of these horrors a few years back and straight out of the box noticed how hot it was getting. Never right in this world. Sent it back and replaced it with a small Yamaha desk, runs as cool as you like. Steer clear of Behringer.

Nothing screams 'built to a price' like those caps...

They designed that device to break 3 days off warranty and then you were supposed to buy another one, fixing it amounts to theft, you might as well have grabbed one at the store and ran away with it! ; )

Cool channel!! Just now climbing aboard. Gotta go back and watch everything now.

Next repair video will be the desoldering station. It got to its lifetime operating hours in just this one video...

I have a real Mackie 1202 that also died due to capacitor problems, though I encountered something new - several of the electrolytics had failed short. I'm used to them failing open... very odd.

Bain of my life bad caps in mixers AV preamps etc, smps’s. Recently had a Denon professional Surround decoder on my bench I think I replaced over 120 caps! Nightmare job haha Love the videos as always!

Thanks for your video and tips. Great Post. I fix lots of audio gear and we got a lot behringer equipment. Nice lab by the way

Just like bananas that look good from the outside, but are bruised beyond edibility on the inside. Some deceptions just never change.

I still have my ub1202 working fine, bought around 2003 or so.

Oh geez I had to do the same to one of those mixers. I also replaced some of the supposedly noisey opamps but that got only partially rid of the waterfall. So the noise problem seems to be related to the potentiometers and resistors.

I have the american made Mackie 1202 (what Behringer basically ripped off), made in the 80s, and that thing actually does need to be recapped. I just haven't felt like taking it apart and doing it.

Behringer wasn't the only company that suffered bad Chinese caps. I had a Nvidia video controller from the same era that had its caps literally explode in my pc. Bad caps were a plague.

Behringer failed since they released their high powered mixer. The old Behringer still the best!

Man, i want a whole hour of the last minutes of this video! 😎

Great video and discussion on capacitor life/temp. ratings. Electrolytic capacitors to me have always been a necessary evil. By their very nature they have a finite life regardless of their quality and heat accelerates their demise.

The story I heard was everyone wanted smaller cap in size but the same cap value. The cap industry jumped. The liquid was changed to obtain the higher rating but it also ended up being corrosive and leaked. Or the sales guy said we need more 15 v caps... just remark the 12 v one and sell them.

Fun Fact: Around 30 years ago, one tech company tried stealing another tech company's formula for making the electrolyte which goes into electrolytic capacitors. Somehow, they ended up stealing an early formula which wasn't properly balanced. As a result, there was a wave of dud capacitors which broke down within a couple of years of use, leading to a lot of tech having to be thrown away since it wasn't economical to commercially replace the capacitors. There are probably still a few Chinese companies attempting to use that same, incorrect formula, leading to the occasional batch of "Chineseum" capacitors. Unfortunately, the Chinese seem to be great at imitating, but useless at innovation. That wasn't always so. It's a pity to see how far downhill a once-great country has gone.

I have two mixing consoles from the behringer xenyx usb series and i have nothing to complain. I mean its not studio quality but the preamps are great and the noise level is low. Maybe the xenyx series is an uptaded version because i know a lot of people who use it and who do not have any problems nor complains. I do also have a XAIR15 mixer for bigger gigs and this one is very good. I have never seen a mixer with such low noise and the midas preamps are really great. Just to say that not everything behringer does is bad. They do a lot of good stuff as well

Removing all the knobs is why I have not attempted to repair the broken XLR jack on my Behringer Eurorack UB2222-FX Pro