The build quality isn’t only as good as much more expensive products, but it exceeds them. The chassis is a very sturdy metal, really chunky and solid (which is good). The knobs, while plastic, are also solid and attached to incredibly smooth pots. Honestly, you’d be hard pressed to find a smoother throw on a knob in any product, regardless of price. I am a professional musician/producer and own audio interface products by Apogee, RME, Motu, Presonus, and Avid. As far as build quality, this box is on par. My limited experience with the sound quality of this box thus far leaves me with the impression that the box is certainly adequate if not excellent. The mic pres are clean with plenty of gain. The conversion is also clean and absolutely not getting in the way of creativity or a great performance.

Beyond build and sound quality, one of my biggest concerns with this box was latency as I am setting up a workstation that will be primarily built around virtual instruments (VSTi’s) and Cubase. I currently have the ASIO latency buffer set at 64 and that’s producing about 6-7ms of round trip latency. When playing virtual instruments it’s about half that. The box also has a playback/monitor mix knob for zero latency monitoring when recording live instruments/voice. So far the latency performance is excellent and has far exceeded my expectations.

Bottom line: You won’t come close to finding something this well built and functional among any of the lower priced audio interfaces. The value for what you’re getting is amazing.

1 – The two front inputs are MONO (studio microphones being catered for) but can be used as Left/Right stereo pair. You’ll need an adaptor on each input to accommodate RCA connectors or for a stereo mini-plug. The mini will require a splitter (check your drugstore or supermarket electronics dept.) to provide independent L/R. It would have been nice if they’d included RCA sockets. Note you have what amounts to only ONE analog stereo input on this unit. That’s enough for me but maybe not some others.

2 – You must first download and install the Behringer drivers. Unlike Soundblaster Extigy and possibly some other units of this type, it will not work with Windows Classic Wave Driver. You’ll have poke around for the drivers at the Behringer site.

Installation is a no-brainer. Unzip the download, run the executable and you are done. You’ll also need a sound recording/playback application. Behringer claims you are entitled to a free copy of “Tracktion” but I couldn’t find it. Anyway, I have Soundforge and there are plenty of others, over a wide range of prices.

Once the drivers are installed it’s a good idea to unplug the UMC204HD, then plug it back in. Also, restart the application if you had launched it already.

3 – The Line/Inst button, when depressed, engages a microphone amp. You won’t need this for standard line inputs.

4 – Works great with Soundforge Pro 12 and previous versions. You must first go into Soundforge Options/Preferences/Audio and manually choose “UMC ASIO Driver” (after installing the driver) for proper routing of Input/Playback channels. Takes just a few seconds. You will probably have to do this with other software too and possibly every time it is launched.

5 – Documentation could be better. It would be especially helpful having explanations for how to accomplish various recording/playback tasks. They seem to think everyone knows the audio industry lingo, acronyms and practices. At this price, a lot of amateurs will be interested and many could probably use some help.

6 – Takes all power from the USB bus. If you have other USB powered devices on the same controller you could run out of juice. A simple, inexpensive solution … get a USB power dongle or power bar with a USB socket at any place that sells electronics, computers or even hardware. My supermarket has them.

7 – Takes some digging to find technical specs. On instruments in my lab looks excellent. I couldn’t find any audible shortcomings with flat frequency response and vanishingly low distortion (no distortion figures in the docs). Even with inputs turned up almost all the way with no sources connected, you still get noise around 90dB down, which is inaudible. I measure a small amount of cross-talk but you’ll never hear that either.

I have used pro audio gear over the years and this unit is in that class of performance. Some recordists will want more inputs/outputs. Behringer has bigger units but, of course, you pay more.

The PROS: it works great, super sturdy, sounds great, pretty easy to use, and great price for this type of interface, very low latency but has direct monitoring blend so latency isn’t even an issue anyhow

The CONS: headset volume pot is a little noisy and crackles (but only when adjusting the headset volume knob, so it’s not really an issue), and the iOS device volume needs to be at 50% or higher in order to get a playback signal back to the interface that you can actually hear. Once I figured this out, it wasn’t an issue, but at first I thought I wasn’t getting any playback audio being sent back to the interface and I spent over an hour trying to figure out what was wrong. Honestly, this may be a GarageBand software or iOS device issue anyhow, rather than anything to do with the interface. I’m not certain either way, but overall it seems to be a great unit! I have an iPhone 8, and a 5th gen iPad, and my primary DAW is Garageband.