I was surprised to see the lack of shielding in the UCA202’s PC board because it doesn’t cost more to design a shielded board and AFAIK they are not more costly to manufacture. (None of the vendors I have worked with has charged me extra for fully flooded boards nor offered a discount for not flooding; but then I am not having boards made in the millions.) Maybe Behringer reclaims the extra copper that is etched off their boards and the copper has more value than the chemicals used to remove it … I really don’t know. In any case, the UCA202 is still a good value, and it’s good to have discovered this “bug” so people can work around it.

BTW, the current version of the RDX-150 seems to be the RDX-150-EF. I have no idea what changes have been made in the EF version.

I don’t know how expensive is the other device, truth is that UCA202 is crazy cheap. When I lower master in REAPER (or whatever DAW for that matter) you can fight the problem and still monitor on good levels – as the monitor phones have quite strong amp or you can use mixer monitoring which gives you enough sound. So… I can bear with it, hopefully there are no pieces worse than mine. On the other hand, man at Behringer told me that I should let my unit examine at local reseller and… I don’t know, maybe switch for a better one?

Thank you for your time and test. UCA202 has its twists obviously, but I still can’t just put a poo on it – for the price is extremely affordable.

Noise floor: -75dB
1kHz: -65dB
100Hz: -50dB
20Hz: -37dB

This is using the standard Windows XP drivers, Audacity for tone generation, and Paul Marshall’s Level Meter V.1.1 (darkwood.demon.co.uk) for input level sensing. Nothing was connected to either inputs or outputs

Very strange … and disappoining.

When I tried the same with my ADS RDX-150 I get:

Noise floor: -78dB
1kHz: -78dB
100Hz: -78dB
20Hz: -78dB

IIRC, the RDX-150 and the UCA202 use the exact same TI codec chip, so the differences here are almost certainly due to layout and supporting circuit issues.

P.S. You might want to try ASIO4ALL instead of Behringer’s ASIO driver. The Behringer ASIO driver that came with my UCA202 was a repackaged version of someone else’s very old ASIO driver. I found that ASIO4ALL gave me better results, but I can’t remember the details.

I wanna check it out with some other ASIO capable DAW, but I have to try some demo version or so. I tried messing with Monitor switch and/or with headphones too, no significant change – but I’ll rather go through various combinations again. When I run the same REAPER setup with Creative’s ASIO (oldish Audigy), no problem… so it must be beyond REAPER. I doubt it is in digital realm, so I blame part of the UCA behind DA converters. When I learn more, I’ll add new information. MAYBE it’s just my piece, I don’t know.

The strange thing is that there is less crosstalk from right-to-left in playback than in output-to-input.

I sent 0dB 1000Hz to it and input level was -65dB, higher freq, even better.
But 500Hz->-60dB, 200->-54, 100->-48, 20(ok, that’s extreme)->-36dB.

Guess how much of some rock drums you can hear in between your singing for instance. The only workaround I see is to lower your master when you record another track.

Thanks for the thanks. I hope to spend some time this summer working a bit with Lucid and other Home Cloud oriented stuff. If I feel that I can make a positive contribution, I will definitely join the discussion!

I guess the tendency is for things to establish themselves on the first really successful products in an area. Then everyone gets brainwashed that those versions of “good” are “the” versions of good. And then those versions of “good” are assigned attributes that are completely made up.

The one field that’s free of vintage-blindness is computing. I think that’s because it’s so obvious that new computers are better than vintage ones. Just try playing Halo on an Apple II.

Case in point: recently, due to a midlife crisis (actually, just a good deal of free time on my hands), I’ve been making attempts to “get back into music” – this meant listening to “what the kids are listening to”, getting new equipment, and investing a lot of time exploring music production software.

I found that 1) I hated most of what is called “retro” or “electro” today, 2) software is generated primarily for cutting and pasting musical “elements” rather than song-crafting (it will date me to say that I really only use MIDI to replicate CV-GATE control) and 3) new equipment is way too expensive, so I better drop the whole idea.

What really bothered me was the first discovery. It seemed that so much of the “retro” bands now miss something in the translation across the ages. Or maybe the transmission from early synth music was filtered to today’s youth in a way I don’t yet understand.

In any case, I just brought home an old Juno-6 and a Roland DR-110 I had in storage back in the old country. Somewhere along the way I lost the manual, so I started frequenting vintage synth forums, and noticed to my surprise that the general judgement today is that the Juno was “phat” and had “killer acid bass”, and that the DR-110 had “sub-sonic booms”. That blew me away – I always thought the Juno was reedy and thin – great for strings and some leads, but very weak on the low end. The DR-110, well, you know.

The whole thing mystifies me really, this cult of the analog. Now when I hear salty-chocolate I can tell my kids it’s bad for their teeth. Try some bubblegum, like that awesome “Hanson” record instead – dmw

Thanks for the suggestion. Others (including AVA) have also recommended Mr Salk. The issues with the model in question at the time were that there was still a fair amount of fine detail work requiring face-to-face training and (more importantly) there was a need to cull HF drivers from the supplier–about 10% of them exhibited what I considered out-of-tolerance behavior. (Compare this to the HF driver used in the L/1 which had a 100% yield!) Since then, another issue has emerged: the LF driver used in the design is no longer being manufactured.

However, I will certainly consider Jim Salk when I find the time to develop a new design. I have seen several samples of his work and his reputation for quality work is very much deserved.

If indeed you are looking for another manufacturer of your designs, I’d suggest contacting Jim Salk at :

http://www.salksound.com/ or email Jim directly at jimsalk@comcast.net.

He has built several designs from others such as Dennis Murphy http://murphyblaster.com/

and David Ellis
http://www.ellisaudio.com/

His work is phenominal and would complement your designs quite well.

Good Luck,

Ron

Congratulation for this excellent post.

My english is too bad for more words.

Tks,

Renato

I think your best bet is to let AVA know that you are looking for another one in case one of their clients decides to sell one.