UMC1820 : Outstanding piece of gear at a killer price

9 years ago

I purchased the UMC1820 for use in a home studio to record drums. It replaced a convoluted setup involving a couple mixers and an old M-Audio firewire interface. It's coupled with the Behringer ADA8200 (via ADAT) for 16 inputs total.

The unit is built very well. It's not especially heavy, but not too light or flimsy-feeling. I've had several Behringer rack units in the past and they have definitely stepped up their game with the build quality.

The UMC1820 packs a ton of features into a small single space rack unit and at an amazing price. The preamps have plenty of headroom and sound great. There are Line/Inst switches and a -15dB pad for each input. There are two +48v phantom power switches, one for channels 1-4 and the other for channels 5-8. It has MIDI I/O, SPDIF I/O and Optical ADAT I/O.

The main thing this unit is lacking is better software control over the features. The UMC Audio Control Panel is very bare bones, giving you only the very most essentials options. You can't select the operating frequency, it's determined by the DAW. There are no routing options and the unit cannot be used in stand-alone for anything other than stereo monitoring of the analog inputs.

If you're looking for a ton of inputs at a low price, look nowhere else. The bottom line is that this unit sounds great, looks nice and is extremely affordable.

Pros:

? Lowest price, hands down!

? Small footprint (single rack space and very shallow)

? Sleek look and sturdy feel

? Smooth knob control

? 8 MIDAS preamps with +48v phantom power

? ADAT SMUX and SPDIF inputs and outputs

? MIDI I/O

? 2 Headphone outputs with independent volume and channel selection

? Direct (zero-latency) monitor/DAW blend knob

? Per-channel Line/Inst buttons

? Per-channel Pad buttons