Behringer Flow 8

I'm a full time one man band/full band entertainer looking for a better way to mix wirelessly. This unit is better than others since it uses bluetooth rather than a router to connect to tablet or smartphone. It has lots of features for its price but the MIC PRE, which is my number one requirement can't be utilized for professional set up as I am used to my MIDAS MR12 and SSL6 mixers when performing. I know I can't compare this Behringer model to the latter but I was hoping to get just a decent mic pre to avail its bluetooth wireless control. Adding to its fragility on the road is the power connector (small charging cable can easily detach and ruin your performance). This is good for podcasting, voice over (recording), but not for singing. But if you are not using this for professional set up (serving paying clients), then the FLOW 8 is better than the competition on this price range.

The mixer itself is fine: compact, sounds good, and does what it should on a hardware level. Unfortunately, the companion app completely ruins the experience.

The app randomly quits while operating, which is incredibly frustrating during actual use. Even worse, the EQ band frequencies regularly reset to 0 Hz, and there is no possible way to change them back. When this happens, EQ becomes unusable, which defeats a major purpose of using a digital mixer in the first place.

Because so much functionality depends on the app, these issues make the Flow 8 pretty unreliable and, in some situations, almost unusable. Solid hardware, but the software needs serious work.

I bought this as a super small format digital mixer to mix my brother and I as an acoustic duo. (2 mics, 1 Ac Guit, 1 bass, 1 stomp box, + iPod break music. 2 Aux, FX required/desired)

The features seemed excellent and it was a great price point.

But I used it on one gig and haven’t used it since. In general the sound quality was disappointing, and the wireless control delay/latency made it annoying. Even with plenty of messing around with it before taking it out, when it came to gig time it just under performed and was too cumbersome.

As someone who has worked in corporate Audio Visual a lot, I would recommend this product for small meeting room systems with a couple of inputs such as lectern, lapel, and PC audio. You could hide it under the lectern, or it is nice and small to sit on an operator desk. The compression and EQ options would work fine for this, and the usb intersect would be great for web casting output.

But for live music? It’s a no from me.
Instead I also purchased a small analogue desk (Soundcraft Signature 12MTK) which is excellent!