Steinberg UR22C Review - Did Steinberg improve the legendary UR22?

hey Julian Kraus here and not too long ago I reviewed the iconic Steinberg you are 22 more to the V you are 22 C is the direct successor so let's have a look at how this new interface performs and see if Steinberg has proved it first let's check out the build quality the prior generation was known for it's a very robust build and that hasn't changed the housing is still the same full metal construction which makes it the you are 22c feel very sturdy and that's also the reason this interface has quite some heft to it the knobs on the front of the device turn smoothly and feel solid with only the big volume knob having a slight wiggle to it even though you normally don't see inside the interface I have to say that this also looks very good and you have to appreciate the little details like this a small clamp which holds the cable in place and keeps it from flopping around on and on the solid metal housing in combination with these smooth and sturdy knobs make the uart when it you see feel like a quality product now on the front of the you are 22 see you can find the two gain knobs for the two audio inputs these two inputs are XLR and TRS composites above the inputs you can find four LEDs to peak indicators which light up when the audio signal is clipping one USB connection LED which turns on when the interface is connected to a PC and another LED which indicates if the phantom power for the two XLR inputs is turned on or off next to the gain knob for channel two you also find a high Z button which lets you toggle the TRS input on a channel to between a line level and instrument input so you can directly connect for example an electric guitar to the interface new on the you are 22 C is the mono button which lets you decide whether you want to monitor our input one on the left and input two on the right or if you like to listen to a mono mix of both inputs further to the right you also find a very handy knob which lets you dial in the exact amount of audio you will hear from the inputs of your interface compared to the audio coming from your DAW of course the you are 22 C also provides a headphone connector which in this case is a quarter in check connector and you can control the headphone volume with the volume dial above the connector so the front of the UART when it you see is very similar to the you are 22 mark - but Steinberg made a few small tweaks one of them is that they made the volume knob bigger and moved it more to the right outer edge which i think is a wise choice as the knobs on the older model we're a bit cramped the UART when it you sees knobs are a bit easier to access oh and the volume knob now lights up when the you are 22 C is powered on on the back of the interface you can find it two balanced quarter-inch connectors for hooking up stuff like active studio monitors and the volume of these outputs is controlled by the big silver knob on the front which we just talked about you will also find two MIDI connectors one input and one output to the left you have a small cutout where you can attach a high-security Kensington lock below that you got the phantom power switch I personally would have liked to see this a switch on the front because it is quite awkward to toggle the switch once you got everything connected and set up on the far left on the back of the UART when it you see you got a USB type-c connector which is used to connect the interface to a PC or iOS device as I already said in my focusrite scarlett review I encourage manufacturers to use the new USB type-c connector so it's nice to see that Steinberg is going this route as well and one more thing I want to point out is that this is a true USB 3.0 connection lastly you can also find a micro USB connector which can be used to power the interface if the device you connected the interface to does not provide enough power through the USB C connection this means that you should be able to use this interface with a something like an iPad or even an iPhone and of course you also got a switch which lets you select whether the you are 22 C is powered wire the USB connection or from the up no external power supply enough about the outside of the device let's dive a little deeper into the specifications and see how the you are 22 serially performs first up sample rate and bit depth the you are 22 C offers a sample rate of 192 kilohertz this means that the interface can capture frequencies way above the human hearing range and you can see that in my frequency response measurement the frequency response is a very flat with only some roll-off at the very extremes the high sample rate might come in handy if you want to slow down the recording and pulsed and pull the high frequencies back into the audible range of course you can always record with a lower sample rate like 96 K 48 K or 44.1 if you like so far so good but what struck me was the maximum sample rate of 32 bit many interfaces these days use 24-bit which can theoretically hold a dynamic range of around 144 decibels which is more than enough to capture the entire dynamic range of this audio face the dynamic range is the difference between the strongest and the smallest signal the interface can capture and you want this to be as big as possible the you are 22 C is expected to have a dynamic range of the mic inputs of 102 decibels a weighted and of course I measured the dynamic range of my particular unit which was even a big bigger coming in at 102 point 9 DB a that's a decent amount of dynamic range and a roughly a 3 decibel improvement over the U or 22 mark - although compared to other audio interfaces on the market the dynamic range is a bit on the lower side still in practice anything with a dynamic range of more than 100 DB will be plenty to work with what still confuses me a bit is the 32 bit bit depth when you have a look at these sound settings in Windows the you are 22 C is reported with a bit depth of 24-bit and when you open up the azure control panel there is no option to change the bit depth and there is also no indication whether the interface is running with 32 or if orbits in the end it shouldn't really matter as explained before the 24-bit can easily hold the entire dynamic range of the UART one juicy and a 32-bit shouldn't bring any improvement here the only reason for the increased the depth that came to my mind is that the 32 bits might be used in the internal DSP which can apply effects to your audio signal calculating digital effects were 32-bit can have an advantage because of the higher precision but that's just pure speculation okay let's have a look at the preamps of the U or 22 C and for that I will switch to the shure sm7b because this a mic has a very low sensitivity meaning that it needs a lot of gain which brings out the noise of the preamps now I'm speaking into the sm7b and you can get a feeling of how the audio sounds like with this mic connected straight to the U or 22 C to get a more scientific reading of the noise I measured the so called equivalent input noise of the U or 22 C which lets you directly compare the noise of its preamp to preamps in other devices the you are 22 C has an EIN of - 123 point 3 DB you a weighted and and this is a bit noisier than what I would have liked to see in such an audio interface here you can see the you are 22 C's preamps compared to other audio interfaces the predecessor the you are 22 mark - did have the exact same amount of preamp nose and back when I did my review of this interface I wasn't too impressed by the preamp noise and sadly that hasn't changed don't get me wrong here an EIN of - 123 point 3 DB u is still ok and you can get low noise recordings it's just that compared to other audio interfaces in this class the preamps simply have a bit more noise and here is what you can expect the noise floor to sound like when you connect a shure sm7b directly to the U or 22 C and here's how the noise of the you are 22c compares to the noise of other audio interfaces all recordings have been equally amplified imposed to let you hear the noise more clearly but other than that there was no additional processing done people always ask me if this interface can benefit from something like a cloud lifter or fed head yes the you are 22c can benefit from such a device and this can lower the preamp noise by up to seven decibels so if you are experiencing preamp noise with the you are 20 to see a cloud lifter or FET head might be the solution for you next up we'll have a look at the maximum system gain if this is too low you will necks out your gain and still don't have enough game to bring your recording to a proper level the you are 22 C has a maximum system gain of around 49 dbfs at 0 DB you and this means that you have plenty of gain even for low sensitive dynamic mics so all good while I was on it I also checked out the mic input impedance as this can have an effect on your sound if it is too low but the you are 22 C has an input impedance of 3.9 kilo ohm and that's totally fine the year round trip latency is a measurement of how long the audio interface takes to put out a signal and record it again the resulting number is a combined input and output latency of course the latency heavily depends on the selected sample rate and buffer size here you can see the resulting round-trip latency with a sample rate of a 48 K and here with 192 kilohertz I have to say these are not the quickest times I have measured but they are also far from being the worst one thing I want to point out is that which buffer size you end up using depends on many factors like the hardware in your PC and also the number of effects in your project you are currently working on so take these numbers more as a rough guideline to what's possible to achieve with EU or 22 C oh and one more point in the control panel you can actually see the input and output latency for a given setting and I found these numbers to line up very well with my measurements now a big new feature of the UART we need to see is the internal ESP which stands for digital signal processing this means that you can process your audio in the interface before the sound is even recorded for example the channel strip effect lets you dial in some compression and provides a simpler graphic equalizer Steinberg claims that the digital processing is done in real time of course when I hear such a claim I always wonder how much latency the processing really adds so I fed a signal into the audio input on the U or 22 C which you can see in yellow and compared it to the signal coming from the headphone output which was set to direct monitoring that's the purple signal here as you can see the direct monitoring signal of the UART when it you see has a delay of about 115 microseconds that's incredibly quick and of course much much faster than processing the audio in the PC as you can see even the fastest around a trip latency was about 50 times longer suffice it to say in that the internal DSP is doing the audio processing in real time as there is no way you would ever hear this kind of delay while making this video I just noticed that the latency is dependent on the sample rate lower sample rates will yield in a higher latency but even at 48 kilohertz the latency was never longer than half a millisecond which is still much faster than processing the audio in the PC I just wanted to mention it for the sake of completeness I want to add that when I activated the channel strip effect the direct monitoring delay slightly increased to about 130 microseconds again and this is an impressive able amount of delay and it is neat to see all this processing done so quickly besides the compression and EQ you can also find a high-pass filter or flip the face and of course you can decide whether you want to record the unprocessed or processed signal with your door there are a few more effects when the DSP software which are guitar amp simulators I think an amp sim is the perfect use case for the DSP technology because it is completely calculated inside the you are 22 C so there is no further processing need on your PC and as my measurements showed before this is all done in real time I think we talked quite a bit about the recording capabilities of the you are 22 C but you might still ask yourself how good is the headphone output well I won't go into details here as I'm going to release a video soon where I'm comparing the headphone amp quality of many different interfaces so subscribe if you don't want to miss it but I can say that the headphone output of the you are 22 C delivers audio with very low distortion and it has a good amount of power and it can drive even high impedance headphones to an adequate listening level one thing that concerns me though is the high output impedance of about 91 ohms this means that the you are 22 C is more suited to headphones with higher impedances around 150 ohms and above with the high output impedance of the you are 22 C's headphone output the frequency response can change considerably when used with low impedance headphones which in turn will color the sound many headphones these days are low impedance and that's why it's so unfortunate that Steinberg chose to go with such a high output impedance on the headphone amp so low impedance headphones are not a good match for the U or 22 C when use Drive a for inaccurate listening experience okay let's sum this all up I think the UART when if you see is a well-built audio interface which has a very robust feel to it the 192 kilohertz sample rate allows you to record a wide range of frequencies even above the audible spectrum and the bit depth of a 32 slash 24-bit lets you capture a decent amount of dynamic range but I must confess with the new model I would have liked to see a bigger improvement here don't get me wrong on its own the U or 22 C is a very capable audio interface it's just when you compared to other audio interfaces you start to wish for a slightly better preamp and dynamic range performance one thing I'm also not too fond of is the high impedance of the headphone output as this can lead to a change in frequency response when used with low impedance headphones on the other hand I really liked the integrated DSP of the you are 22 C which can apply effects in what is essentially real-time with this feature you can process your audio with a simple effects like compression and EQ even before you record the signal I can imagine that this is a really handy feature for streamers which can use the DSP to process their voice in real time this way the audio will stay in sync with the video and there is no additional stress put on the CPU by any effect because it is all calculated inside the interface and of course the integrated guitar amp simulation can be very useful too because there is no perceivable delay with the DSP these effects should feel very responsive lastly I want to point out that the whole audio for this video was of course recorded with EU or 22 C so this should also give you a very good indication of what this interface is capable of that's it for now feel free to subscribe to my channel and please give me a thumbs up if you liked this video and we'll see you all in the next one [Music]

Channel: Julian Krause

Views: 129,297

Rating: 4.9537354 out of 5

Keywords: UR22C, UR22MKII, review, test, noise, dsp, guitar amp, simulation, latency, USB3.0, USBC, usb-c

Id: PSa27hkj3G8

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 27 2019