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BEHRINGER U-CONTROL UCA202 USB Audio Interface Review (for linguists)About BehringerBehringer is a German company with a manufacturing base in China. Their Chinese factory has about 2800 employees and has recently enjoyed a significant R&D investment. Behringer makes good professional audio products, at an affordable price. How to add two-channel high-quality audio to your laptop computer?Option #1. USB or FireWire audio interfacesSuch interfaces typically have two microphone/line inputs with basic gain control and phantom power but with limited signal routing and mixing capabilities. The M-Audio FastTrack Pro ($250) is one of the most popular such units. The most important disadvantage of such devices is that they require vendor-supplied proprietary drivers, which adds an extra layer of complexity for the end user. For example, while my M-Audio Audiophile 2496 works perfectly under Windows XP, I have not been able to make it work reliably under Windows 7, without getting crackling artifacts at sample rates other than 96,000 Hz. It is an odd kind of bug, and has been confirmed by other users of M-Audio devices. Option #2. Behringer UCA202 ($30) USB audio interfaceWouldn't it be great if we could get rid of the driver (in)compatibility issue completely? The USB specification includes digital audio, yet until recently it had been nearly impossible to find audio gear using the platform-agnostic USB architecture to deliver digital audio data. More recently, however, there have been more and more devices available using the USB audio codec to deliver CD-quality PCM audio. Those include a variety of USB microphones (e.g., Rode Podcaster) and multimedia headsets (e.g., Logitech ClearChat USB). The Behringer UCA202 (around $30) takes advantage of this technology to deliver 48,000 16-bit stereo PCM audio via the USB interface to Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers that support the USB audio specification. The good news is that most modern computers do support this standard so you should be able to simply plug the device in and start using it almost instantenously. This type of installation is far superior to solutions that require proprietary drivers because it just works. In addition, Behiringer supports 64-bit operating systems and ASIO drivers, which will satisfy those who use software specifically designed to take advantage of the ASIO technology (e.g., Adobe SoundBooth CS4).
Figure 1. Behringer UCA202 ($30) USB audio interface Mackie 402-VLZ3 mixer ($100)The solution I describe here will only cost around $130 and will give you really decent quality and functionality. True, it does not support 24-bit audio, but it does 16-bit A/D and D/A conversion really well. Simply connect the Behringer UCA202 interface with the Mackie 402-VLZ3 mixer and you will get a four-channel desktop "studio" that will meet most speech recording needs, including recording interviews, podcasts, voice over, digitizing analog recordings, etc. Figure 2 shows a diagram of how to connect the Behringer UCA202 to tape inputs and outputs of a mixer.
Figure 2. Conneting the Behringer UCA202 to the Mackie 402-VLZ3 mixer Summary of the advantages of the Behringer UCA202 interface
Audio testsIn my audio tests, the Behringer UCA202 performed flawlessly with Windows XP Pro and Windows 7. The audio is clean and the sound is excellent. I didn't do spectral tests of speech because I was mostly interested in the ease of use and quality of A/D conversion, coupled with the Mackie mixer's pre-amps. Overall, a great $30 little unit.
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