Buy Behringer TRUTH B2031P Ultra-Linear Reference Studio Monitor PairBehringer TRUTH B2031P Ultra-Linear Reference Studio Monitor Pair Product Description:
- Ultra-linear frequency response from 55 Hz to 21 kHz
- High-resolution, passive 2-way 150-Watt nearfield monitor
- Extremely high-resolution, ferrofluid-cooled tweeter
- Long-throw 8 3/4" woofer with special polypropylene diaphragm and deformation-resistant aluminum die-cast chassis
- Controlled dispersion characteristics and extremely large "sweet spot" through BEHRINGER's wave guide technology
Product Description
High-Resolution, Ultra-Linear Reference Studio Monitor (price per pair, only sold in pairs)
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
A Truly Incredible Value
By Patrick Wolf
Pros:- "Ultra-Linear" means flat & accurate, which these are.- Sound is very clean & clear. Not too bright, and not harsh.- Can be had for <$130 if you use price matching.- Highly recommended by the people at audioholics.- Bests most speakers costing 3x as much(~$450).- Can be modified for further enhancement.- Easily reveals flaws in the source which some might consider a con, but that's what a good speaker is supposed to do. This is a necessary trait for good quality sources to sound their best.- Some may consider the bass weak, but this is not a con. The bass is not artificially boosted. It simply conforms to the speaker's physical limitations. Need more bass? That's what a subwoofer is for.Cons:- Can only handle up to 100 watts (not a problem for most).- No grill, but if handy one could create and install them.- Didn't order from Amazon. Mine came with yellow stickers in the lower right corner instead of the newer black ones which look much better. They came off fairly easily and cleanly using my fingernail though.Comments:I can't stress this enough; the price of these does not reflect the quality.I spent 4 painstaking months researching and auditioning speakers in my home. I compared 6 different pairs and the 2030's beat all but one.I auditioned the following:- Energy CB-10 (yuck)- The Speaker Company's best pair (who's now belly-up)- Axiom M3 v2 (very good, 2nd favorite)- Ascend CBM-170 SE (sound virtually identical to the B2030P)- SVS SBS-01 (didn't sound forward enough, however I see a new revision is going to be shipping soon)I went back and forth many times with each pair playing various mp3's, video games, and some movies (DVD & BD). Eventually I came to the conclusion that the B2030P & the CBM-170 were the most "pleasant" to listen too. I chose the 2030 since they are cheaper and I didn't need the power handling of the 170.I've got 2 pairs setup in a 4.1 w/ an SVS PB10-NSD, VSX-819H-K, PS3, X360, & PC. I've got the mains on SpeakerDudes and the sub on a GRAMMA. I'm doing 4.1 instead of 5.1 because in my unique setup when using a B2030P as a center it draws too much attention to itself. In a traditional setup this wouldn't be an issue.Before this I had used the Klipsch Promedia 5.1 for about 9 years and it was great, but it's quality is nowhere near the B2030P's + a decent sub.I've been using this setup for ~5 months and it's still impressing me.Note: This speaker is ALL black. That gray part around the drivers isn't a light gray like you see in some of the pics out there. However, that part is a plastic-like material and does reflect light slightly.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
Good for the money, but there are better speakers available now...
By Joshua E. Hunsaker
I have to admit, when I first got these monitors... I was really quite impressed. Smooth sound, very good tonal balance, respectable low-frequency extension and they are built like tanks. These guys weigh in at a formidable 25lbs. a piece! For a passive 8" monitor that's pretty impressive really. They are indeed VERY flat as well. In room response as measured with a Dayton EMM-6 into a Focusrite Saffire Pro 10 using REW for frequency sweeps and calibration showed a degree of accuracy that is typically hard to touch at this price range. For a while that's really all I was concerned about (I took a sort of "well as long as the numbers/graphs here tell me this is an accurate speaker then by golly I'm going to just mix with reckless abandon and trust that is so!). I have a Behringer DSP1124P which I dumped all the frequency corrections from REW into to achieve as flat a in-room curve as possible (the boosts and cuts were pretty subtle overall however). I've been using these in treated rooms for the past 6 months and mixed somewhere around 50 songs on them I would assume. I was using them paired with Behringer's own monstrous (discontinued unfortunately - they do this on all their decent products for some reason) dual 8" bandpass subwoofer - the B2029A. I thought I had it made in the shade until I decided to take some recent mixes and try them on a friend's monitoring system composed of a pair of Prodipe Pro Ribbon 5's running directly from a Fast Track Ultra on a nice new i7 Mac.I will say, I wasn't really ready for what I heard - every mix I had meticulously poured over that I brought to test on his system had high-hats and treble that was absolutely screeching (high-frequency levels were just way way too hot). "This can't be right" I thought to myself and immediately set to double-check to see if there was any processing going on in either itunes or somewhere else that was causing the huge translation discrepancy that I was hearing. EQ was disengaged in itunes, no hardware hooked up to the Fast Track at all but the HF level adjustment on the Prodipe's was at +1.5db. I figured I might have found the issue there but wanted to be sure so I cycled through a bunch of other commercial tracks he had on itunes. I noticed a slight bump in the high-frequency area with other tracks/material but really it was no comparison; those tracks were totally listenable while my tracks had me reaching for the volume knob to prevent my ears from bleeding with every high-hat tap. Not good. These tracks I had just mixed sounded absolutely dialed in on my system at home based around a treated room with active RTA eq correction and a pair of Behringer 2031p being powered by a very respectable 150wpc studio amplifier (interM R150 Plus) and doing the ports-stuffed-with-cotton mod (flattens the high-frequency response slightly by reducing edge diffraction artifacts). After some checking I also came across sound-on-sound's review on the Prodipe Pro Ribbon 5's which even points to a HF level bump of +2db being preferred by the reviewer:[...]I left my friend's house pretty miffed. This shouldn't have happened really and I had the frequency response plots to prove it...! I got home and retook the measurements, this time with the RTA equalization in place. The response was within +/- 5db down to 30hz, just as it should have been. The response basically mirrored what was predicted with the EQ changes I dumped into the Behringer digital eq unit. Ugh. It's never fun to realize that what you had assumed was "so perfect" turned out to be leading you to a slew of very poor mix decisions. I disconnected the Behringers and hoisted a pair of JBL 4410 control monitors into their place (these buggers are massive and not sized for my desk so I had been using the Behringers instead assuming the Behringer's "flatness" equated to "being able to mix better on"). Did the same RTA process with frequency sweeps and then room and eq correction. The response was very flat, but not quite as good as the Behringers. Then I sat down and started listening to the songs I had mixed previously and realized that the treble energy WAS way too high. Wow, it was a whole different story here with the JBL 4410's without it making sense per the measurements how that could even be the case. Worlds more mid-range and high-frequency detail and suddenly I was hearing very clearly that I had been mixing and pushing tons of gain (i.e. way the crap too much) into cymbals and high-hats and drums on the treble end without giving it a second thought while mixing on the Behringer 2031p's.Let me be (potentially) the first to tell you that a single frequency sweep graph tells you essentially NOTHING about how a speaker will fare in the real-world when it comes to mixing applications. Was it that Behringer doesn't publish power compression curves of their speakers showing what is likely a pronounced high-frequency drop when a complex high-gain signal hits the voice-coil on the tweeter? I have no clue, although I wonder now because the 035Ti tweeter used on the JBL 4410's in comparison is specifically stated in the JBL manual for those speakers to "[exhibit] virtually no dynamic compression" (which knowing JBL's heritage of utter accuracy, is likely dead-on). Maybe also a very high level of distortion in the Behringers? I can only assume here as well that may be the case as the second thing I noticed mixing on the JBL's was that I was going back through every project file I had done previously on the Behringers and stripping off every exciter/saturator plugin from the master buss because I could clearly pick out not only the intense high-frequency boost but also excessive harmonic content that I had added thinking (again, while using the Behringers) that it was actually "sweetening the mix". Totally wrong. It was obvious distortion. Granted, the JBL 4410's 035Ti is a very respected and well known tweeter (good pairs routinely fetch over $150 per pair on ebay, and for good reason) but the difference was seriously staggering in terms of what I was hearing. There shouldn't be even a comparison between the Behringer 2031p and the JBL 4410 accounting for the respective quality of parts and level of engineering that went into each pair and I guess that's really exactly what I found here. The people who will tell you "modern engineering dictates that the newer speaker will sound better even at it's significantly reduced price-point" have obviously never ever done such a test or likely researched much into JBL. The 10 inch driver of yesteryear used in the 4410 uses the SAME Aquaplas coating that JBL employs in their $70k a pair Project Everest DD66000 (which uses 2 of JBL's venerable 1501AL paper-drivers - much to the chagrin of a certain friend of mine who believes paper-cone drivers are "cheap garbage", the 1501AL has an absolutely insane flux density and weighs something like 36 lbs.) The Behringer by comparison uses a polypropylene (plastic) cone. Decades later and JBL is still using paper cones in it's most ambitious speakers to date? I think that should say something.Anyway, what I'm not saying here is that the Behringer 2031p's are poor speakers. That they are not, they are fine speakers for the price point and do a lot of things right. BUT they are not going to give you a chance to replace the Genelec 1031's they try to copy. Not a chance in hell of that. In fact, the there are a number of active speakers I would recommend before I even mention the Behringers in this case - specifically the Prodipe Pro 8's or Prodipe Pro Ribbon 8's (the Pro 8's are actually less new per pair and the Pro Ribbon 8's are just tad more including shipping cost). Even the M-Audio BX5a would be preferable! (I've always been impressed with the latest iteration of the BX series of monitors from M-Audio in comparison to similarly priced models). The missing detail, added power compression and distortion present with the 2031p's IMO disqualifies them from any type of serious mixing detail. I won't use them ever again for that application. In this sense (as they bill themselves as a "studio monitor" specifically) I can only really give them 3 stars. I know a lot of people love these things. They do measure VERY well but as I mentioned a single frequency sweep no matter how accurate is zero guarantee of real-world application. Critical mixing applications will leave you acutely lacking, though I think it takes actually hearing a very GOOD monitor (the JBL 4410 definitely fits that bill) to see why. The lack of midrange/high-frequency detail really skewed me to "see" my mixes as being actually deficient in treble energy - so I boosted stuff like crazy to compensate. Investigate other options very seriously before settling on these. I've also owned the active versions (2031a) which I used for a while and thought were actually worse than the passive.However, I have heard extremely good things about both the 3031 and the 1031, which are both a radically different design approach in terms of drivers (and also cabinet for the 1031). This review is no way an indicator of how those models may fare in a mix environment...OVERVIEW - Behringer 2031P Studio MonitorPros:Well-builtNice aestheticNot fatiguingRespectable LF-extensionMeasure well when in-roomCons:Very deceiving to mix onPoor translation to other systemsExtremely poor mid to treble resolutionLikelihood of high-distortion and power compression in the tweeter
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.Love 'em
By George K. Taus
First pair of studio monitors I have ever owned, so I really can't compare them to anything else. However, I'll just say that I love these speakers for my mixing table and feel that they deserve the highest rating as given by others. If you don't have a power amp to drive these speakers, get the active pair by Behringer. These speakers sound great.
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