The New Behringer DEQ 2496

There is an addition to my Shack these days. After having two full racks with mostly Behringer tube gear, going to the DEQ 2496 was kind of culture shock to me. Almost all the functions that I was doing with all those boxes is now done in one box the 2496. I had argued for a long time that it may not be a good idea to put all your eggs in one basket, but after trying the new box for a month I was sold on it. There is enough flexibility and functionality here to completely change my mind. I now have all the other equipment boxed up and stored in my ham shack. I don't intend to sell the excess equipment, because who knows something else may come on the horizon that will require some of the excess equipment.

I have left the description and setup for all this equipment at the end of this section so those of you who still use it or plan on using it, can have a reference place.  

                                               Table of what Modules I am currently using.

The programming on this box is accomplished by pressing buttons and tuning knobs.  Be careful of the knobs," the two small ones and the larger one". By pressing in on these buttons, Their function changes. I will try to tell you about them as I get to them in this description. 

Deciding which features you want to use is up to you. You can read the manual and determine which ones will work for you. Some modules are not suitable for amateur radio and are intended for the sound engineer or recording engineer. I have selected the modules as indicated in the above chart. Most hams using this box have decided to stick to the convention of pretty much using the left channel and bypassing everything on the right. 

There are three (3) main sections on the faceplate of the DEQ 2496.

1- The section that has the METER, RTA, COMPARE, and MEMORY buttons in it. 

 2- The middle section that has the PAGE, A, B GRAPHIC DISPLAY and the two SMALL KNOBS,  and the one BIG KNOB. 

3- The third section on the front panel has the nine (9) buttons that you use to select modules and or functions. The top six buttons are actual modules and the bottom three are modules that you use to control the top six.

Rear View of DEQ 2496

Now to the setup of the modules I have selected to use. Remember these are for me, and may not be optimum for your voice and other pieces of audio equipment. I will not cover the UTILITY, I/O, or BYPASS buttons as they are the same as in John NU9N's Page www.nu9n.com . 

Here is my current setting for the PEQ for the Kenwood 850/DSP-100.

Here is my setup for the Pro III. I use the GEQ settings with these setup. The Freq. are not in order but in the order I added them when I was getting the sound I wanted.

Here is my current setting for the GEQ.

Table of setup for the DEQ   

The PEQ has two (2) pages. The first page is just a simple graphical representation of the setting you put in on the second page. You do the actual enter on the second page. Pushing the page key will get you to the second page. By the way on all the pages shown in the display in the middle of the face plate of the box is a page indicator. 

It is on the left upper part of the display. It looks kind of like a few cards in an index card box. The page you are currently looking at is highlighted. You can easily see how many pages will be cycled through by the number of index indicators that are shown on the page indicator. Again make sure that you have the left channel indicated by being highlighted. The upper little knob moves the curser over left to right. The bottom little knob moves the curser up and down. The large knob changes the value of the display that is highlighted with the small, upper and lower knobs. The knobs can be pushed in one to get a finer setting. That is to say if when you turn the knob if it goes to a gain of lets say +9.0 and you want +9.5, you can press in on the knobs so that you can get the numbers you want. Do not do as I did and hold the knob in and expect that something will change, just hit it once and it will go into the fine mode, hitting it again will put it in the normal mode. 

Click here to go to the rest of the DEQ 2496 and the rest of the equipment pages