Behringer U-CONTROL UCA222 Ultra-Low Latency 2 In/2 Out USB Audio Interface with Digital Output, Compatible with PC and Mac, Red

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.

Bought to transfer/digitise old tapes from a Tascam Portastudio to a mac mini. Works with no troubles and excellent sound and build quality. Excellent value too. 5 stars without a doubt.

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.

I just wanted to wrote a quick review to give an oversight and correct some of the nonsensical reviews on here.I have seen loads of off-putting reviews on this site about this unit and most of them seem to be problems with the end user. Let's address some of these:* "Doesn't work with Windows 10": It does work with windows 10. I plug it in, I have a USB Audio Device. i am running these units with Win 10 / Win 11 and Linux. There's no problem.* "They're not low latency": Meh, with the stock windows driver (plug and play) they're not noticably latent. I you need ultra low latency, download the ASIO drivers then!* "It's in MONO!!!": Yeah, Windows has a tendency to sometimes see new audio devices like these as, basically, USB microphones. i had exactly this in Windows 10 where I was getting only left channel inpt presented as both left and right channel to the computer. You need to open the sound settings in Windows, find the USB Audio device and select 2 channels and the sample rate you're expecting. If it's set to 1 channel this is exactly what happens. It's a 30 second fix if you know what you're doing!* "Crackles, buzzing etc": use decent shielded cables then. If you are linking things together that span devices with their own power sources and you're getting that weird "cpu noise" interference (like on old sound cards in PCs) then invest in a USB ground loop isolator. It will break the direct ground between a USB device and the ground on the audio input and fix the problem. This is basic audio stuff. Read up, noobs!* "It doesn't have standard instrument ports on it! What are these 'RGB' connectors???": Good lord it uses industry standard RCA phono connectors LIKE VIRTUALLY EVERYTHING ELSE WITH LINE IN AND OUTPUTS! You can't plug a 1.8" jack from a guitar into this thing, it's not a guitar pre-amp!!!Ok. On to the review.I have bought three of these devices which I use on a variety of computers for streaming video and various audio work. For the money (£18 new / £14 used at time of writing) they're amazing value. Sound quality is great. 16bit / 48kHz sampling - probably all you're going to need if you're operating at this price point. They for working with line level audio. Both input and output sounds spot on. I find them to be low noise and low latency for what I do with them. They have an actual volume dial on them and a headphone jack which makes them good for listening to music from computers with horrible on board sound etc. The headphone jack doubles as a monitor when the monitor switch is set to on.I bought my first one of these units probably over 10 years ago. I've not had a single problem with any of them and the subsequent two I bought were in a lovely red colour and second hand on Amazon.I have only one gripe with them, so read this it will save you a LOT of time if you happen to be using them in the niche case I was using one of them...I have some real time compression software running on Windows and a dedicated little PC which I was using to provide some professional level dynamic audio compression. I was using one of these devices to feed audio in, compress it and feed it back out again, as these things work bidirectionally. The compression software was set to pull up quiet audio. I had some really weird issue where I was getting some really peculiar low frequency noise showing up in this situation and it took me ages to get to the bottom of it. The problem seems to be there is some leakage between the input and output, something that isn't normally noticeable in most setups however, it's a big enough problem to make using the device in this configuration impractical. The same thing goes for when I am using the device as a USB input, feeding audio in via Voicemeter Potato into the compression software and recording this to disk (whilst monitoring via the same device's out put). When I stop and start audio abruptly I can head a short echo effect, which puzzled the heck out of my for ages, thinking I'd messed up something in the software set up, however the problem was due to this slight input / output crosstalk. I wouldn't have even noticed this while recording the audio as the echo is quiet and masked by the main audio but it would have been there to some extent in the recording. Simply not using the output as my headphones device to monitor the recording, fixed this.This doesn't appear to be a fault with the unit. I got the same thing with all of them. So beware. But the chances are that you will never encounter this problem, however I am sure I have since read someone else mention it in another review but I can't find it any more!Hopefully that covers everything. I love these devices. They're no-nonsense and just keep on trucking :)