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.

My main purpose is to record several sound sources in a sophisticating quality in my home studio (2 keyboards (stereo), guitar, microphone, theremin).

I previously used a 2in/2out interface and due to the number of instruments a small mixer was necessary. The downside is more signal processing, thus affecting recording quality. Obviously a 4x4 interface wasn?t enough, so I was looking for a real capable solution (which is 8 INs).

I use this with two studio monitors. In addition I want to play music without the computer. Before this I had to unplug the interface and switch to the monitors manually every time.

My new solution is the MIX/MONITORING knob of the UMC1820. For me this is THE KEY FEATURE! It is just a knob and I didn?t really notice/understand it?s usefullness before I tried it the first time. I can switch between standalone monitor control (with a clever mode "stereo" - simple, but does the trick) or recording/playback. No mixer, one unit for all! Even more: I can monitor the real latency of the recording software. In the middle position one can hear the direct monitor and the sound with latency superpositioned and feel the latency.

I use this unit under linux (jack, ardour) and it works out of the box. With the KXStudio Kernel I get a roundtrip latency of 7,3 ms (this is independently measured folks, not a fancydandy Windows display number!), which is quite good for me.

Mic preamps were not my main focus (as I don?t own proper mics). By the way: Before Behringer acquired MIDAS: ... ohhh high quality preamps, excellent repsonse!!! After: ... sounds fairly OK, ... but obviously focusrite is superior! Really? Come on guys...
Digital signal I/O features are also not used (no suitable gear).

Other nice to have features:
- 2 MIDI ports with activity LED
- 2 loud! headphone jacks
- potential for a 7.1 surround mix setup: I will definetly run some experiments with such a setup later on!
- potential for live (software) mixing with a small band

and the bottom line: it?s sub 200 EUR!
To be honest: I would have paid more for it, if had to!
The 2,5 times more expensive Scarlett 18i20 has (in my opinion) inferior features (MIX/MONITORING knob).

TLDR: good unit, with a QC issue or two

Bought this with the intention of having something that could record live drums in the future, turned out that I ended up nearly maxing out the inputs with just my guitar, bass and vocal recording equipment before I ever got my hands on drums. Lets start with the good:
* 8 combo xlr/jack inputs
* plug and play on linux
* ADAT connectivity on the back
* 2 headphone outputs
* sounds good
* no more fiddling with what is plugged in where

Granted, every decent interface for the past 20 years has figured out how to do clean preamps, but hey, they work well and are cheap. The noise floor is more than low enough for most practical appplications. ADAT expansion to take you up to 16 mic inputs is very nice and works, although I haven't had a chance to test how well it'll handle it.
Final note on this section - not needing to constantly change what is plugged into where when recording is an absolute godsend. Such a minor thing that saves so much time, since I'm not wondering "wait, what did I plug into which input again, and did I remember to adjust the input gain"

Now for the bad - these are minor issues but worth noting:
* noisy headphone A port
* very high noise floor on input 5 when used in instrument mode

These are minor, since I'm mostly recording real mics and typically use headphone A for my IEMs when mixing, which require very little volume before they start becoming too loud, but they exist. Probably an issue with the unit, but it's not a big enough deal for me to be bothered to fix it. But as with all cheap gear, you are gambling on getting a quality unit shipped to you. A small gripe about the ADAT whilst you're here - it only supports adding an extra 8 channels via adat, and have the ability for an extra 16 via ADAT would have been very nice, but that's a minor nitpick since most people don't need to record more than 16 mics at once.

Overall - pretty good piece of kit, and about as cheap as you'll get for new gear

So, you get 8 input channels with great preamps, 2 headphone jacks which (if need be) allow you to route a separate mix to each via your DAW, easy real-time monitoring, MIDI IN/OUT, not to mention a variety of other useful buttons, knobs, and ports... all of that for the cost of many lesser audio interfaces? Sign me up!

The sound quality is great. Out of the box, I was having some strange issues witch digital clicking and popping, but they were gone after updating the drivers, so make sure you do that before you panic.

When it comes to output latency, 256-384 buffer size seems like the sweet spot if you are also running some software instruments and effects. Quite standard. A live instruments- and analogue-only setup could probably be pushed even further, but I have not fully tested that.

The only questionable "quirk" of my unit is input 7 making a humming noise even with its gain knob turned all the way down, but the moment I plug anything into it, the noise disappears, so I just make sure to keep it in use.

To sum up, this does not look or feel like a 200-dollar interface – it is solid and packed with features. If you are on a budget, I would definitely recommend this one.