Behringer UMC1820

Firstly I'm really glad I bought this when I did, it's gone up in price significantly since I purchased, and I can see why. The price is still good for what you get.

I needed a 8-in 8-out interface (of course more I/O with ADAT) and I naturally looked at all the options from other makers, and because this was a secondary setup I decided to go for the cheap option.

out of the box you notice that Behringer have lifted their game in terms of construction. It's seems more than tough enough with good finishing. At this price point I don't expect pots with fastening nuts or exotic textures.

How do it sound? Very, very good indeed. I've heard some critics talk about how Behringer have just slapped the midas name on front of these products to make people think they are higher quality. I can assure you the preamps are as good as anything you'll get in the home to small project market. For instance they compare very favourably with my A+H ZED R16.It's also a noticeable step up from their Xenyx preamps (although they weren't bad at all), especially in terms of SNR. Indeed the SNR is very good and the sound is lovely and clear. I also achieved more than acceptable latency in DAW monitoring with no glitches. The first recording I made with this is one of the best sounding I've ever made, but this could be coincidental.

I tried out the ADAT with my ZED R16 out of interest and play back was fine. I found that I had glitches when recording that ended up being printed. The UMC was correctly slaved to the ZED so the glitches must be due to some other problem. I cannot blame the UMC1820 as I also tried SPDIF with a different input device and that was fine. So this is not conclusive, but I'm pretty confident with the right config the ADAT I/O will work fine and is no reflection on this unit. This kind of thing is sometimes tricky anyhow...

The provided control software is simple but effective. That suites me just fine. The only thing I had was that sometimes when turning on the PC, the UMC1820 was not recognised and needed reinstalling. i think this might be to do with USB 3.0 bus standards. However, I found that if I made sure the UMC was switched on before switching on my PC, the problem didn't occur. So I think it's mostly likely a glitch of some kind in one 'popular' operating system.

In summary I think this unit will make the heart of a fairly serious home or project studio, especially if you also combine it with an ADA8000 or perhaps the ART Tube opto 8 for extra inputs/flavour.

UPDATE: the problem with the unitmnot being recognised sometimes is completely solved by switching to a USB 2 port. No problem for me.

UPDATE 2: managed to get the ADAT working perfectly now both ways too.