Behringer UMC204HD Audiophile 2x4, 24-Bit/192 kHz USB Audio/MIDI Interface with Midas Mic Preamplifiers | For Recording Microphones and Instruments

So first of all this interface straight out of the box is of sturdy construction and comes with the required usb to hook it up. It provides 48v of phantom power to my DI box no problem, and the preamps have a very distinctive texture that in my opinion are second in sound qualiry only to Audient, who are very expensive and give you less inputs and outputs for your money. Both preamps are that weird hybrid kind that accept both jack leads and xlr cables, possibly more but unsure as i only tend to use those two. The pad that you can toggle to set the preamp to line level or instrument level is pretty nifty and could save you from having to use a di box depending on what you're plugging into it. Direct monitoring is pretty cool too you can switch between stereo and mono, very useful when you use headphones, and can also adjust the mix to the point where you can only hear whats going into the interface, or what's coming out of your DAW, and any blend of the two. As well as the headphone jack on the front it can also have i think it's two sets of monitors hooked up to the back which can be switched between on the front of the interface. Only drawback personally is that the LED system to check levels and clipping is ony like, two lights one green one red but that's fairly common amongst interfaces in and beyond this price range. All this coupled with the fact that it'll probably outlast my laptop and has midi ports on the back, makes me say that this is the ideal audio interface for producers/recording engineers, etc, who are starting a home setup, want a lot of options in terms of functionality and dont want to upgrade for a long time. And it's extremely useful for people of all levels as a portable interface. Fantastic piece of hardware for a fantastic price.

I’m using this to record my old vinyl records into digital files which I can play on my phone and other devices. I’m very impressed by it. My record player is connected to my NAD3020A amp. I’ve connected the Behringer UCA222 to the Tape ports on the back of the amp using my own amp cables, and then connected the Behringer to my Windows 10 laptop using its USB cable. On my laptop I’ve installed the free Audacity software for doing the recording. It’s all working wonderfully. I’m very impressed by the sound. Of course, you are not going to get the quality of a modern high-definition audio recording, but I think the Behringer is giving a very faithful recording of my records. Setting up was far easier than I expected. Other than downloading Audacity, I didn’t need to download any other software or drivers. The only glitch was that the sound was initially being processed by my laptop as mono. Looking some helpful reviews, I realised I needed to change to the settings for this recording device to “2 channel 16 bit 44100 Hz”. To do this on my laptop (others may differ slightly): open the Control Panel; from the Sound menu choose Sound Control Panel, then choose Recording. From the Sound pop-up window, select Microphone 2-USB Audio CODEC to open the Microphone Properties, then select the desired 2 channel 16 bit setting from the Default Format panel. Having done that once, I have not needed change it since. Although no software is supplied with the UCA222, the recommended free Audacity is good. It looks a bit daunting at first, but the basics are pretty simple, with an interface similar to a tape recorder. And there are some simple inbuilt tutorials to guide you through some other things you might want to do, such as click removal, channel balancing, track marking, and removing inter-track noise. I was hesitant to buy the UCA222, having read some of the reviews that encountered problems. However, for my needs – recording records via my amp – it’s working superbly.

Very quick delivery, nicely packaged, what do you get? well it's a very smart piece of tech not as bright a red as in the product pic but more of a burgundy...might be useful info for someone! anyway I plugged it in and it worked.. no messing around, great sound, I got it to hook up my Boss BR 800 and my Alesis M1 Active speakers, all sounding pretty good. I have windows 7 on my pc, now I don't recall the product description saying this wasn't compatable with windows 7...the product is! as I have said it all works well..apart from the bundled Audacity software, which is for Xp and vista...it even say's on the audacity website that it won't work in windows 7, so why they bundle this software is a bit strange, I tried installing it but it kept crashing, after a quick visit to the Audacity website I noticed they have a windows 7 version (beta) not finished but working and available for download, (downloads and installs in seconds) It's quite a nifty programme and for now sorts out my recording and playback requirements. It also comes bundled with Behringer's own DAW, which dodesn't seem to work, and can I get a keyboard hooked up to it?...nope! and when it plays back one if it's demo tracks it sounds distorted. Forget it, use it as a coaster..it also comes with another disc, full of synths and drum sounds, presumably to use in the DAW as I can't see how you use it in Audacity? Main product is good, DAW software, not so good. (not windows 7 compatable

I am writing this review because when I read the negative reviews for this bit of kit, I had a niggle reading them that people had not set up their PC's properly and so the UMC was not performing properly. Now I own it, my niggle seems to be confirmed as it has been nothing but smooth sailing. I'm also writing this for anyone who is looking for a cheap interface that can handle separate channel cueing to headphones for digital djing for under £259+, as that is why I bought this excellent bit of kit. For reference, I am on a windows 10 pc, I7 CPU, 16gb of ram, 4tb of storage and a Nvidea GTX 1060 6gb ram. USB audio interfaces can be a bit pernickety about your pc setup. It varies from interface to interface, and it depends on how complicated the interface is. SO here is what you should do before installing one, this goes for the UMC204HD but it goes for other USB audio interfaces as well. Firstly - Your USB and chipset drivers for your MOBO. Windows 10 SUCKS at these. Windows update is not your friend for this. You need a decent 3rd party driver maintenance software and you NEED to have the best USB and chipset drivers installed. The best of these softwares have a trial mode that allows you to download a driver or 2. So get your USB and your Motherboards chipset up to date. A lot of the bad reviews would not be bad if people knew to do this. If Behringer had tech support, they would tell you to do this. Another thing, it doesn't come with a cable. Don't use that old USB B cable that fits your printer. Get a brand new one like https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B081TW2MFK?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1 , again if people had done this, even less bad reviews. The software. If on Windows 10 get BEHRINGER_UMC_Driver-V5.57.0 from their website. Installing. Firstly to prevent any possible conflicts, disable your motherboard or laptop's built-in sound in the bios. If you have had any other audio interface installed before you got this one, unplug it obviously and uninstall its drivers. If you are paranoid like me you will then install like this. 1: plug the UMC in. 2: install its driver software. 3: when installed unplug the UMC then plug it back in. 4: restart your computer. I set playback at 96000 hz as for a lot of interfaces thats kinda a sweet spot. SO. to basically reply to the myriad of bad reviews that made me think buying this interface was a gamble, I have had no pops in the audio. No dropouts of the interface. I have set Fruity loops 2024 and Stanton Deckadance to use the UMC's ASIO driver and have had no problems whatsoever. If the pc goes to sleep it still works when its back awake, dont have to unplug it and plug it back in. just some software needs to be restarted. If you're a digital DJ this unit is the best thing you can find for the price range. It has 4 outputs, so you set 1 and 2 as your main and 3 and 4 as your monitor. Works like a charm. Only quirk I have found is that the front panel volume pot doesn't affect the volume coming to your speakers if you put phonos in channels 1 -2 . no, you need to put them in the main out for the volume pot to have an effect. That means you either need a twin quarter-inch jack lead with the other end being what you need for your sound system, or quarter-inch jack adapters for your phono lead. I saw buying this as a gamble because of all the negative reviews, but I am very pleased with this piece of kit. I hope you will be to.

I bought the UCA222 to connect the 'tape' outputs from a HiFi amp to my laptop for digitising LPs. It's extraordinarily good value! I see it's increased in price to around £17 compared to the approx £12 I paid, but that is still amazing value! I know there's a specific version of this device which takes a turntable phono output directly with the required RIAA equalisation, but I didn't want to have to keep disconnecting the turntable from my amp. This does the job perfectly using Audacity to capture the audio. It has a headphone output to make monitoring easy too. The audio quality is excellent. I've tested it with both Mac and PC and it just works, with no drivers to install. Fabulous piece of kit at a fantastic price!

I bought this to enable a stereo line input on my laptop, which like most modern laptops lacks such a facility. It works out of the box with no need to install drivers, although you can install the ASIO For All software if wanted (a separate and free download). You will almost certainly need to go into the Windows sound device settings and configure it for two channel (stereo) recording, since Windows seems to assume all sound input is mono. It has a "monitor" facility, which means you can plug in headphones to the 3.5mm stereo socket on the back of the device and listen to the sound it is capturing, a useful feature. Stereo recording and playback both work very well and bypass the limitations of standard laptop sound hardware with ease. Out of curiosity I wanted to see if it would work as a souncard oscilloscope input. I already have a "real" oscilloscope so don't actually need such a thing, but it does perform reasonably well as a two channel scope, albeit limited to audio frequencies (20Hz to 20kHz) and 1Vrms signal levels. The sampling rate and Windows recording volume settings need tweaked to get this working well, 4 to 8kHz sampling rate and volume setting of 35 resulted in a 1kHz sine wave being well displayed on my laptop. It's obviously not in the same league as a proper scope, but for simple work on low level audio frequency signals it could be useful at a fraction of the cost. This doesn't come with any software CD. I already have Audacity installed on my computer and it works fine with that. I am no audiophile so I cannot say how it works with other applications, but for my purposes it works perfectly and the price is hard to beat. Possibly those requiring more sophisticated studio level facilities will want something different but for casual home use it really is a winner and I don't hesitate to recommend it.

Im only using this device in a limited way, based on the description of what else it can do. It is taking the USB output of my laptop and converting it to an optical output, which I am sending to some active speakers, and also it gives me headphone output. It's a brilliant bit of kit, it works without drivers plug and play. The optical output allows the better DAC in the speakers to give high quality sound. But also the direct headphone output (which uses this products own DAC) deserves credit. I was using an Arcam rdac which converts from USB to headphone output, which gave very good audio quality, however this device though perhaps not quite as good is much (much) better than the headphone output on the laptop. I mainly purchased this to go from USB to Optical and it works perfectly. It also has RCA outputs and inputs which i may use later, it all looks very well made so no doubt they'll work fine as well. Top product. Update - 10/10/2024 - I am now using the RCA inputs to take the audio from a TV, and the RCA outputs to go to a smaller speaker in another location. Such a brilliant device, 2 inputs (USB+RCA), 3 outputs (Optical, RCA and 3.5mm headphone). Still working perfectly and all powered by USB. I can listen to Teams meetings over headphones, music with the optical out to a nice set of speakers, listen to the TV mixed into my laptop output, and listen to meetings in another room using the RCA outputs. I might even buy another one as a spare.

Connecting my Brennan B3 to some speakers through an amp was a no go, this unit cheap, great, and actually works was the interface I needed, small unobtrusive, works every time, very happy.