Behringer U-Control UCA202 USB Audio Interface

This is my second device. I bought one ~ 7 or 8 years ago at the recommendation of an Audacity sound engineer on their forums. I wanted to record my college team's games from my stereo to listen to later. It worked perfectly for that. I am also able to stream videos or songs from my computer over my stereo system... much nicer than my computer audio. I can also plug in my headphones to the 3.5 mm jack on the Behringer unit to listen without disturbing my family.This unit is being used to stream audio for a small Church service & is working well. The RCA jack inputs and outputs are geared more to consumer level audio systems and works very well for that functionality. I have had my 1st unit for a long time & although it is made of plastic, and has been bounced around a bit from home to office to other places it has never failed me. It is plug & play so there is no need to install any software, though I highly recommend Audacity for doing the recording, mixing & perfecting the sound quality... eg digitally boosting recordings that were made at low volume level up to the maximum without clipping.The one thing to be aware of is the audio setup. You will probably need to click on that to switch the audio input &/or output to the USB device. Otherwise your computer may still want to output the audio to it's own speaker system, or to use the computer microphone rather than the stereo audio feed. Not a big deal, but it won't work without telling it which audio stream to use or which playback device to use.For a big commercial setup with balanced cables you would be better off getting a different audio interface with TRS 1/4" &/or XLR connectors, though you could use this unit with adapters.

If you want better quality sound than offered by your laptop or computer’s onboard mic/headphone jack, look no further than the Behringer.It isn’t the most robust build but it does its job well and will last a decade or more if you take care of it and store it properly.It’s not flimsy or poorly constructed but it’s plastic so if you use it for gigs you set up and break down - just buy a small padded bag for the 202’s and use it to store them.Mine, and I believe all, have analog in or out as well as a headphone cue port with volume dial. It’s an external DAC, so the USB goes to your computer/tablet or phone, sending digital audio to the DAC which as the name implies - flips ones and zeroes into analog (how we hear) externally and without the noise of the built in jack. As it’s surrounded by heat and noise (electrical noise) from the packed together system that makes a computer. From your C/GPUs to storage power supply and a couple dozen radios (WiFi Bluetooth NFC - dozens of cellular bands and signal types 3G/Edge, LTE, 5G and mm Wave - and multiples of frequencies under each. As well as the different types of controllers; USB, Thunderbolt and HDMI, MagSafe and SD readers - display and battery, you get the point).$25 way of getting excellent audio for amplification out of a computer bypassing the noisy, hot and lesser sounding built in jack.Weighs less than a deck of cards and is plug and play on both macOS and Windows.

I needed a way to transfer some of my old and favorite vinyl record albums to iTunes, and this is the simplest interface between my AV Receiver and my Home Theater PC.I plugged the Record Output from my Yamaha AVR to the Line Input on the UCA202, plugged the attached USB cable on the UCA202 into a USB port on the HTPC, and downloaded the latest version of (free) Audacity software to the PC. Audacity recognized the UCA202 as a generic USB audio input, so I just opened up a new project, switched the AVR to the Phono Input, cleaned the record well, started my turntable, and clicked the Record button in Audacity. When the first side ended, I quickly turned the record over and played the B side. Then clicked the Stop button in Audacity when the second side finished.That was the easy part!!It takes quite a bit of work to edit the audio file into something that I can import into iTunes!Fortunately, there is a very good tutorial on the workflow process in Audacity's Help files.The UCA202 does a great job of making the connection.On the Cons side: the documentation provided with the UCA202 is awful! It barely covers the port and control descriptions, and provides no help for the software, so you'll need to look to Audacity for most of the support.For the record, the "Monitor" switch on the UCA202 controls both the Headphone jack AND the Line Out RCA jacks, so it needs to be ON if you need to monitor the recording during the process. The volume control, however, only affects the Headphone jack.In summary: the UCA202 is an excellent audio interface, but you'll need to be prepared to do some research, and spend some time in post processing to get good results. I would suggest if the songs are available on Amazon, iTunes, or online, it's WAY easier to download them than it is to record it yourself! However, I have some family heirloom albums that could not be obtained any other way.