U-Phoria UMC204HD : Quality product - works perfectly in home studio setting

I spent a good while researching various audio interfaces in the ¤50-150 price range (Focusrite and Steinberg + others) which were suitable for a home studio setting and this came out on top for me. I've been using it for recording electric guitar into my DAW (Mixcraft 7) and it works exactly the way I was hoping for.

One of my main concerns was finding something that offered little or no latency and the UMC204HD does that, even when monitoring through my PC with a backing track running in the DAW. Nice !

So far I've experimented with the following:

guitar > AI > PC (no effects)

guitar > amp (with effects) > AI > PC

guitar > AI > PC running an amp sim in Mixcraft.

No problems in any of them and a good clear signal coming through each time with latency of around 1ms (which is pretty much negligible).

The unit itself is fairly straightforward to use so the lack of a bulky user manual is harly surprising. When I received it I connected to the Behringer site and downloaded the latest firmware update and read the PDF manual. It took me a lot longer to figure out the parameters in the DAW on my PC (in the end the Wave RT in exclusive mode worked best for me). Connect it to your PC (the usb powers the unit AND transfers the signal), connect the guitar, monitor through the unit or your PC and it's up and running.

A couple of good features on the UMC204HD that I liked include the headphone monitoring volume control knob and the pad buttons on the inputs and I haven't found anything that doesn't work as I would want it to. I don't use MIDI nor am I a vocalist so I haven't tried these settings but I've no reason to think they wouldn't work as well as the instrument-in settings.

All in all for a guitarist / instrumentalist in a small home studio I think this unit will be hard to beat for the price. It's well made, light and portable, feature-rich and does what it's supposed to do and does it very well. I'm certainly very pleased after a couple of weeks of use and I'd recommend it.