Very bad experience with Behringer UMC204HD

After reading a good review I bought a UMC204HD but I have to say that in compared to yamaha AG06 behringer have a lot of more issue in termos of stability. Comparing them with same frequency, number of sample and VST yamaha is a lot of more stable without noise…behringer have a lot of crunk, glight and so on. That’s my personal experience on the exemplar that I have.

I use one of those and it’s been working fine for me. I’m on an i3 laptop with 8 gigs of RAM (Win7), I would say the buffer and other settings are probably the main thing that’s touchy for me. There is a bit of the noise in the input channels, especially if you have to turn up the levels. The MIDI latency is very good for me. Guess it’s a YMMV situation, I think all this audio stuff is so touchy. Having WiFi off helps me a lot and having antivirus turned off.

I have the same interface and it has been rock solid- I agree that maybe there’s another issue going on. Make sure drivers are updated, your computer is configured properly, blah blah blah…

Now that said, Behringer makes great stuff for a great price UNLESS you get the lemon and I gather because they buy huge huge lots of components for cheap (thus helping them be able to make stuff for such a good price) if you get that unit that happened to get made from a large percentage of crap components then you have, well… crap lol So maybe that is going on.

I’ve had a good experience with my 2 year old UMC204HD.

My settings;

Using driver V4.38 on a very old i5-750 Windows 10 computer. I have UMC control panel set to run 128 buffers with safe mode enabled. All music software is set to run UMC ASIO driver at 44.1 including windows 10 sound panel. The latency is good for playing live, MIDI into computer & audio back out to UMC. I use TRS outputs direct into my monitors (quiet). I use UMC 1/4 inputs for my hardware synth. So can’t comment on mic balanced inputs.

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The only gripe I have with the Berry interfaces is that their MIDI part is kind of flaky - it keeps changing its name ****-1, ****-2, ****-3 - even though I religiously plug the interface (UMC1820) into the same USB port. I solved it by using a different USB MIDI interface and ignoring the Behringer MIDI port. Got too annoying to need to find out the current name at the start of every gig or rehearsal…

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A little off topic,

I switched to a mio4 a few months ago for MIDI. My setup got a little more complex and needed more MIDI I/O. So currently using UMC204HD for audio, and a mio4 for MIDI.

I don’t do too much teardown / setup anymore, so I didn’t really notice the MIDI port name changing on the UMC like Torsten explained. But could be an issue. Still liking my UMC204.

I bought a pair of UMC204HD’s when they were on sale at Sweetwater for $60 each. I bought 2 so I could have a backup laptop/audio interface. They are able to achieve reasonably low latency. For keyboards I was happy with 256 at 48Khz.

When I started my current edrumming project last year I switched to 64 at 48Khz with just a single VST loaded (Superior Drummer). I’m running it on the edge of it’s abilities. If I load a large drum kit (4GB) I get some minor noise artifacts that I can live with. Smaller kits play fine. The response is very good with my AudioFront eDRUMin. Visiting drummers have commented that it plays like a dedicated drum module such as a Roland TD30.

For OP I would agree with others here that it should play very well, especially at 256, but it does seem that loading a lot of VST’s can impact it’s performance.

I’ve been thinking about buying a Zoom UAC 2 (USB 3.0)

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I’m very happy with my UMC204HD v4.59.0. I run a fairly heavy load at 128/44100 in safe mode and have no problems.

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Just for any other UMC204HD users. I was running with 4.38 and everything was working great so that meant I had to try 4.59.0 so I would have something to troubleshoot :face_with_raised_eyebrow:.

I installed, restarted, power cycled the unit and loaded up Cantabile. The sound was distorted and no matter what adjustments I made it remained that way. So I uninstalled that driver and went back to 4.38 and all was fine. Then one day 4.38 started distorting for some reason so I downloaded the 4.59.0 driver again and it fixed the problems and I’ve been using it since. I have no idea what was wrong the first time.

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I’ve had that happen to me, and it was a corrupt driver. Apparently it became that way during download. I downloaded again, and it was perfect.

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I see that a lot are happy with behringer. It is not a bad gear but respect yamaha I register more noisy.
Of course it could be that the driver doesn’t work righ with my hardware but as I say…same hardware, same VST yamaha have very low issue noise also with low buffer, instead behringer have about 10 time problem more.
I can say also taht now I give back behringer to take a Steinberg UR24c and I can say that this is also better than yamaha (quite close in latency but little bit better).

The thing is, your bad experience does’t mean Behringer is bad. It may mean YOUR Behringer was bad. Did you try another one?

Of course. No, I go with Steinberg to be sure of the result.

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Well I don’t blame you for that :wink: