Behringer U-Phoria UMC204HD Reviews

its ok for its price

does what it needs, sounds good untill you twist the gain up 4/5 way up you can hear some noise kickin in. But myself I'd never use that much gain on anything. So i really like it.

3 months later

After having used this sound card for 3 months now, i can gladly say it's exactly what i was looking for. The inputs signal is great, however i must admit it does clip rather easily if you push the gain on the channels. This is normal though for an interface in this price range you wouldn't expect it to set the standards. One of the only sound cards in this price range with MIDI i/o (trust me i have done a lot of research). One of the cool features i found in addition was the possibility to plug pedals to it.

I use this to record my Mic and Guitar in mono and sometimes a synthesiser in stereo, for the road it's perfect small and compact with very heavy duty build. It hasn't taken much damage, but it has taken somewhat of a beating during my travels (i tend to put everything in my backpack).

If you're looking for a small sturdy little companion, i would definitely recommend this bad boy.

Pros:

- Cheap

- Good build

- Great sound

Cons:

- Always have to watch the clip alert (until you get the hang of the gain levels over different instruments)

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.