Behringer FBQ2496 and REW - anyone?

[Greg Dunn]

I have an opportunity to try one of these as a 20-band PEQ (not using the feedback destroyer options) and was curious if anyone else here has used one.

Seems like it would be a killer parametric, what with having 20 different frequencies and MIDI control to send the parameters back and forth. I see in the REW manual that sending the filter data can be problematic, but I'm going to give that a try because it would be much easier than manually punching in 40 PEQ values.

 

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Don’t mean to be a wet blanket, but there’s virtually no chance of needing 20 filters per channels. I’d suggest wading through my article on Minimal EQ / Hard Knee House Curve before you start.

Regards,
Wayne

 

[Sonnie]

Wow... talk about bringing back memories. I believe the more popular version was the 1120p, but there were a lot of people that used the 2496 for the same PEQ abilities. It works.

 

[Greg Dunn]

I actually tried a DSP8024 that I had lying around, just for fun. It only has 3 PEQs per channel though, which isn't nearly enough. I'd rather have too many and not need them than have too few!

 

[Greg Dunn]

OK, I got the FBQ2496 and set it up. Everything seemed to work OK - it sent the filters one at a time, lighting up the little LED indicators as it progressed. For some reason, it doesn't see the unit to retrieve data - probably something I've overlooked. But all the data went to the unit from REW.

However - about 3/4 of the filters have frequencies that are significantly different from the values set in REW. Some of them are correct, many are not. It's not a matter of the frequencies just being 1 increment above or below the correct value; some of them are 3-4 clicks off and always lower in value than the commanded setting. I was able to manually set them to values which are acceptably close and the system now measures very near to the REW predicted values. The BW and gain settings are all spot on; it's just the frequencies which were misapplied.

So I reset the filters, verified they were all cleared, and sent the MIDI data again. Perfectly repeatable, still sending the wrong frequencies to the same filters. Not sure what's going on, but it's consistent.

Edit: after reading the manual closely, I have a suspicion: frequency is sent to the FBQ2496 as a coarse value and then a fine value. Perhaps the fine value is not being received or processed by the unit? That would explain the seeming hit-or-miss center frequency as well as why it is either correct, or too low.

 

[Sonnie]

John will know more about the MIDI, but you could always manually adjust the frequency values.

 

[Greg Dunn]

I did - not a big deal, but if there is a possible bug, better to know about it.

 

[Michael Nilsson]

I know this is an old thread, but I still think it makes sense to share my experiences.
I have a new FBQ2496 (2024-02-06) and it works perfectly if you depend on really low latency (monitors in the studio where instruments are played in real time).
There has been a small bug which has caused the center frequency via MIDI to be a few steps off.
But it is fixed now and will hopefully be included in a REW release when the time is right.