The Behringer UCA202: A review
November 12, 2015
It took me two evenings of troubleshooting to get this unit to work properly.
The Behringer UCA202 did not work on my older Windows 7 laptop without its drivers, not without having high latency. Unfortunately, not only are there no drivers included with the UCA202 itself, but also the download page no longer includes drivers.
The only way I got this unit to work is to go to the the Wayback Machine and download the old drivers for the unit (click on the “downloads” tab and scroll down).
As an aside, while some people have gotten good results using ASIO4ALL with the UCA-202, I could not get them to work and got much better results using Behringer’s own ASIO driver. My OS is 32-bit Windows 7 and my VST host is the free VST Host program.
Since these driver files are so critical to the operation of the Behringer UCA202 in Windows, I have included the 32-bit Windows 7 driver download along with the 64-bit Windows 7 and 8 driver download here. The 32-bit driver has the md5sum 5a84c7dadd614acdb26100a578072b25 and the 64-bit driver has the md5sum 19b87285d34489a5555b7ddf0b535ff7.
The unit is a bit noisy; while the unit has a 89db signal to noise ratio, the digital noise it does have is an unpleasant sound; levels going in to the unit have to be carefully set to keep the noise low enough to not be annoying.
One place where the UCA202 really shines, especially for its price point, is latency: While I could not get the UCA202 to work in the RTL Utility, I got about 9ms of latency with a recording done on my Tascam DP32SD, which means this unit has a latency, after accounting for the Tascam’s own latency, of about 7.5ms. There really isn’t much else on USB which gets better latency than that (while the $250 USB Roland Quad capture has less latency, other units with less latency are non-USB units).
Once I installed the proper drivers, the UCA202 makes a reasonably quiet full duplex incredibly low latency interface, but the noise was noticable enough that I decided I was better off using a 2i2 instead.
This unit’s output is more quiet then its input, and it has a headphone jack, so it can be used as a really nice sound card on systems without working sound. It doesn’t even need special drivers when used this way.