House Guests are Gone, Behringer UCA - 222 preliminary review

Hi everyone,

My sisters and one of my cousins were visiting last week, so blogging kind of got pushed aside.  But yesterday I recieved my Behringer UCA222 interface, which is exactly the same as there UCA202 interface only with some bundled software, which I haven't tried yet.  The bundled software includes a DAW that says it works with linux, so I will probably give that a try very shortly, but it is going to have some stiff competition with Ardour 3's recent beta release, which includes MIDI functionality.

Behringer UCA222 (and UCA202) preliminary review

Links:
Behringer UCA202
Behringer UCA222

Introduction and Setup

Anyhow, the Behringer UCA222 I picked up for a little over $25 off of amazon seems to be really worth it. On opensuse 11.4 (which I just upgraded since 11.3 was being phased out), you set it up by plugging it in, going to Yast->Hardware->Sound, then you highlight the device that is listed as "USB Audio CODEC", which said it was not configured.  Just click edit to configure, like it says, and you can use the normal configuration to set some volume and issue some test sounds.  Then afterwards, you can select it, and from the "Other" dropbox in the lower left corner, you can select the option to "Set as Primary Card".  Of course different distros will work differently, since YAST is just for opensuse, but hopefully they should be just as easy.

Sound Quality

After closing the sound configuration, it should save the changes, and your computer should  use the new audio interface instead of your old card whenever you do anything.  And there is a noticeable improvement over my old soundcard when listening to MP3's, I am thinking that is probably due to a better headphone amp in the interface than in the internal soundcard.  Additionally, it will be the new "system" entry in the QJackCTL connections windows.

There must be something I am missing in all this, however, because in a perfect world you could plug in a bunch of them and use them as different audio inputs within the context of a JACK session, but anyway this setup suffices for the amount of hardware I have, and constitutes a good basic install.  The device was listed as class compliant, so it is not surprising it works with the generic driver.

In addition to basic sound quality, I think I managed to test the latency a bit by using my digital piano, into a MIDI to USB connector, into the computer, into the linuxsampler program, out into the Behringer UCA-222, and into an amp.  There was some latency, but there was a noticeable improvement over my internal sound card.  This is probably due to the digital to analog converter in the Behringer device being better than the one in the sound card that came with my old, cheap computer.  It still felt a tad sluggish compared to the audio outs on the Yamaha P-85 (the digital piano I use), but it didn't feel nearly as weird as it does without using the interface.  It is hard to quantify latency without precise instruments, but subjectively it felt a tiny bit delayed but not so much so that you'd have to consciously compensate for it.  And I'm not so sure that any of that has anything to do with the device yet, it could be that it corrected nearly all the latency from the digital to analog conversion, and that the  rest of the problem is somewhere else, including my bargain basement MIDI to usb converter.  And for $25, with shipping, any reduction in latency makes it worth the purchase price.

Conclusion (or is it....)

Well I still have not tested audio input on the device, or the bundled software, so I am reluctant to recommend the product as anything other than a low hiss, low latency external sound card for playback.  It performs these duties pretty admirably for the price, and it works pretty easily with Linux, since the generic usb drivers work just fine for it.  Also the only output I have tested is the headphone jack, I can't really speak for the RCA or optical outs.

As a surprise, it came bundled with a program called energyXT (though I think it is something of a light edition,) which runs on linux.  Also it has a bunch of VST instruments on a disk, which I will probably try to see if I can use via wine.  The UCA-202 doesn't come with this stuff, but honestly I would have gotten that version except for the fact that I found the UCA-222 for cheaper.  Ardour 3 is coming with MIDI support, and it looks very promising, and in the mean time you can use Ardour 2 in tandem with Rosegarden or Qtractor.  Ardour 3 also currently has a beta release, which I will be examining shortly.

Anyhow, the majority of this product remains untested, but in all honestly just the improvements in playback would warrant the price, and even then just for the lack of hiss while playing mp3's!  At this price the only reason not to get it is if you already have better equipment.  For those of us putting together a bargain basement music production set-up, this thing looks very promising.