[RWP] Does Behringer U-CONTROL UCA222 have internal drivers?

[Patrick Perdue]

I've got three or four of those UCA-222's. They work fine for exactly 
what I wanted to use them for, which wasn't speech. I can pretty much 
guarantee that if you look at your little cheap USB sound dongle thingy, 
you'll get the generic Microsoft driver, regardless of the name it comes 
up with.
The input on the UCA222 isn't too bad for a cheap 16-bit device, but 
it's easy enough to make nasty things happen with unbalanced USB I/O. 
Also, any USB audio device I've seen that uses this same Texas 
Instruments codec, the exact model of the chip I now don't remember, all 
open and close their amps like that. I've seen this on lots of small 
format mixers that also include USB audio as well, such as the Alesis 
Multimix line, and some of the Yamaha MG stuff.

Also, the digital toslink output on the UCA222 comes after the D/A 
stage, which, to me, totally makes no sense at all. Why bother 
converting to analog, then back to digital again?

Oh well, whatever.

On 1/23/2014 11:32 AM, Indigo wrote:
> Well, that little cheap Chinese USB device that; I think; you also have;
> says in the included docs that came with mine it has a USB driver built
> in the hardware, so requires no external drivers whatsoever.
> Maybe that is true, I guess I could get it up and going, then go to
> Control Panel/System and look to learn what driver, if any, is shown;
> that is; if I cared enough.
> I save it for emergency use, when all else fails, like it came in handy
> when doing an OS install that didn't include RealTech drivers.
> It was useful just now; to show me that the PCI express Asus card is the
> only sound engine that quits speaking after I opened Reason 7.
>
>
> Anyway, if you can hear the Behringer U-CONTROL UCA222 opening and
> closing its audio constantly, that definitely rules it out for speech.
> The first thing I would have thought was that it is a noise gate that
> was opening and closing, so the user can't hear the nasty background
> hiss from its cheap AD/DA converters. smile.
>
> I have a very quiet and transparent sounding  USB device, the eMu 0404
> USB, which has XLR ins and headphone amp, but Creative eMu says it
> cannot be used simultaneously with my eMu 16 16M PCIE card.
> I think they're probably correct, since Creative tends to use the same
> strings of code in all their drivers, so one can expect all kinds of
> conflicts when using more than 1 of their products.
> With extreme care and careful order of installation, some have run an
> eMu soundcard plus something like an Autigy card, but I really want to
> totally avoid those times when software gets into a head-butting fight
> and speech disappears.
> I guess I'll look for a USB device for speech other than the cheap
> little Behringer,
> Thanks,
> Indi
>
>
>
> On 1/23/2014 10:33 AM, Patrick Perdue wrote:
>> It just uses the default Windows composite audio class USB driver.
>> It opens and closes it's op amp every time speech starts and stops, so I
>> wouldn't recommend using it with speech unless nothing else works.
>>
>> What's this "internal driver" thing all about? I don't understand this
>> terminology.
>>
>>
>> On 1/23/2014 10:36 AM, Indigo wrote:
>>> I just tested with my $10 thumb drive sized USB device, and the Asus
>>> Xonar soundcard is definitely failing to provide speech, when the little
>>> USB device does work for speech.
>>> I'm wondering if the Behringer U-CONTROL UCA222 has its own internal USB
>>> drivers, or does it use the Microsoft Generic USB Audio Driver?
>>> The little $10 USB device really has independent internal drivers, so
>>> sometimes will work at very low computer levels, when nothing else would
>>> provide speech.
>>> It's just crude sounding, and invariably comes on at ear-splitting
>>> volume.
>>> The $30 Behringer U-CONTROL UCA222 at least has its own headphone volume
>>> control, and claims high quality ad/da converters.
>>> I wouldn't expect those to be fantastic, but if it'll be totally
>>> reliable for hardware speech, it'll do.
>>> So, my only concern is whether the U-CONTROL UCA222 has its own internal
>>> drivers or uses the default MS generic USB audio driver?
>>> Thanks for any help,
>>> Indi
>>>
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>>
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