Uli Behringer

Uli Behringer (born 1961 in Baden, Switzerland) is a Swiss musician, sound engineer and entrepreneur. He is the founder and managing director of the audio technology manufacturer Behringer.

Childhood

Behringer's father was a church organist and nuclear physicist, his mother a pianist and interpreter, his uncle professor of composition at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich and his aunt a classical singer and pianist. At the age of four, he started to learn piano. When he was five years old, his father built his own church organ with over 1000 pipes and integrated them into the family home. He had bought the organ from a church demolition in 1965 and was the first to build an electronically controlled pipe organ. At that time, all organs were pneumatically or mechanically controlled, and the manual couplings were mechanical.

Behringer was allowed to help his father to build this organ and learned a lot in the fields of crafts and electronics. At 16 Behringer built his first synthesizer - the UB1. In 1978 he built his first digital reverb.

Business and education

In 1982, Behringer passed the entrance examination for the University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf as a sound engineer, (which was connected with piano studies at the Robert Schumann Institute). He earned his living partly in hotels with piano playing.

The college was equipped poorly with equipment. Behringer wanted to have his own recording studio, but since professional recording technology was very expensive at that time, he could not afford the equipment as a student. One day he opened a mixing desk that had been repaired by a friend and found that the components cost only 200 euros, but the unit was sold for 2000. He found that unfair and annoyed him immensely.

So he started building devices for himself first and offered them to his colleagues for comparatively little money. After word had spread that Behringer's devices sounded good and were very cheap, all his fellow students wanted to have devices from him. To his astonishment, he had sold ten devices before he even made them. Behringer began converting his home into a production facility.

In 1987, Behringer and a friend received a production order. The developed devices were sold under the name Greenfield and gave Behringer the financial means to start his own company.

This was, according to Behringer, the moment when he realized his personal mission: making music available to musicians so that they could exploit their talents. He refers to this as his corporate philosophy. 1989 he presented for the first time Behringer branded devices from the company.

The first devices were an exciter (sound enhancer), a denoiser (noise reduction system) and a compressor. Shortly thereafter followed the successful compressor Composer, which has sold over 500,000 units to date.