Testing The Cheapest Audio Interface on Amazon

on this channel I often talk about affordable equipment and this is where the price and performance of a piece of equipment is really good but a lot of people have been asking me straight up for the cheapest equipment possible so I went onto amazon.com and found the cheapest audio interface I could it sells for $29.99 dollars and it's the barrier a euphoria um to audio interface in this video I'm going to be comparing it to my professional Audient interface which is affordable but still costs an awful lot more than this so there's going to be loads of audio examples and if you stick around to the end I'm going to be giving this away to someone who needs it so watch to the end and you'll find out how to enter a giveaway to win this one for free as usual with cheap gear the box makes all sorts of crazy claims about its performance including low latency audio file quality and the state of the art microphone preamp which is comparable to stand-alone Boutique preamps so we're going to be taking a look at that this is the interface here so starting with the front we have our inputs here so we have an XLR and a line input and mic on line one instrument two we have direct monitor button on the front and it didn't have that this would be completely useless now explain why in just a minute I'm just gonna cut in here for a minute because I forgot to mention the direct monitoring later in the video basically on Windows at least you need drivers to use this I downloaded a zero for all which is free and no matter what I did I couldn't get the buffer size even close to small enough to hear my effects in real time so I had to bypass the computer and use the direct monitoring switch here so without this that interface is completely useless but it does work with the direct monitoring switch there right back to the video and then we have the headphone output there is like a film that you can peel off but I'm just keeping that on there because I'm giving this one away moving to the top we have these three dials so we have the input one gains instrument gain and then the output for the headphone jack the microphone preamp here is not the preamp that's sort of comparable to boutique preamps like they say it is it is noisy it is not super high quality you really cannot use all of the gain here because there's an awful lot of hiss and noise the second input this instrument one here is alright but it's just pretty average to be honest and again quite a bit of background noise the output however is fantastic so this headphone out but I've been testing with my bare dynamic 1990 pros and the southern 70 pros which are both 250 ohm headphones so that's quite a lot of power needed to to drive those headphones and this has had absolutely all the power I haven't needed to max it out or anything like that which I sometimes do with other interfaces you have to turn this all the way up to the top it will get a little bit hissing a little bit noisy but I never need to turn it off that loud anyway then moving over to the back we have two outputs here to power studio monitors if you have them I don't think this is really aimed at people who are powering studio monitors just due to the price I think this is more for headphone users it has the USB which is going to send all the data to and from the computer but it's also going to provide phantom power for the microphone should you need it and that phantom power is triggered by this on an off switch just here I'm not you know blown away by the build quality of it it's fairly minimalistic which is nice it's not too tacky but all of this stuff here is wobbly it's all plastic but that's enough talking so let's get straight into the audio demos and I'm gonna be using my DT 1990 pros so this is pretty much the best headphones I can get my hands on make sure you're listening in headphones or studio monitors so you can really hear hear the details really closely the audio examples are an electric guitar and an acoustic guitar the electric guitar was just direct into the interface and the acoustic guitar was using an XLR and a condenser microphone with the phantom power turned on each of the examples I have compared to the audience which is my other sort of high quality interface let's go nice clean signal compared to the behringer and immediately you can hear that there's less detail but there's also some hissing the background so now I'm going to switch between the two and you can hear the difference [Music] mmm and just at the end here I had a little bit of a strum this is what I meant when I said the instrument input was okay but it's nothing special the high end seemed slightly suppressed but also a little bit quirky which is a little bit strange but it's completely usable so the next thing I tried was sort of a really dynamic test with the microphone this was using the condenser microphone just seeing if I could play something really delicately and also really loud really loud strumming as well and to see how the preamp would react to that change in dynamics so the audience I was playing really quietly as quietly as I possibly can finger pick and you've still got a lot of detail there and then when I transition into the louder section [Music] I even actually clipped the preamp here but you don't hear any bad or audible Distortion now on to the behringer one this first time I had the gain staging all wrong and you'll hear what happens you I had a huge amount of distortion even though I didn't hit zero so just regular quiet playing [Music] and this was really interesting because I've never experienced this with a preamp before we didn't even hit zero and we were clipping and there was no limiter there was no compressor on the chain once it got to about minus 3 dB it just completely Clips it and it sounds really really bad but that's just a gain staging problem you should be able to go higher than minus 3 but I gave it the benefit of the doubt tend to gain down a little bit so you've got some detail there at the start there is more background noise compared to the audience and that was a little bit cleaner but there's still a lot of distortion on those big strums you can see with the audience there's big spiky transients and it dips back down again whereas this is kind of just squashed it's not really reacting very well so if I wanted to record the really loud stuff I'd have to turn the gain down even more but if I turn the gain down that much this sort of really quite finger picking would have been completely impossible to to raise the gain on without the noise floor of the room just pulling all the way through it what I've learned from those 2 examples is that if you use a more high-end preamp or interface you can kind of get away without gain staging perfectly you know you can record things really quiet you can record them a bit too hot it's quite forgiving but if you're using this interface here you don't have that luxury you have to be right on top of the gain staging all the time the next example is just some finger picking and I've got the gain curve in the middle so the gain staging makes sense this time it's not too quiet not too loud here's the Audion and really pay attention to the noise floor and the hiss [Music] [Applause] just at the end here you can hear that the noise just keeps going that hiss wears on the audience it's rather clean but if I were to add effects to this such as reverb and compression listen to how the audience takes this compression and reverb and really uses it to enhance the sound you know the reverb is really clean the compressions leveling stuff out whereas with the behringer it just sounds really noisy [Music] [Applause] you know which is again slightly disappointing it's completely usable but it's not great and that's kind of the point I wanted to make here I'm gonna finish the video with one more audio demo which is sort of like a little piece that I put together using only this interface but just to conclude I mean I'd say it's completely usable but the sort of claims it makes on the box are simply not true and while it is ok it's definitely not an investment piece I don't think this would last for you know what 10 15 years of studio use I don't think it's designed for that and I would definitely recommend investing in something of much higher quality however I will be giving this away to someone who needs it because it is perfectly usable and I don't need it in my studio so if you do need an interface or you know someone who needs one who might like it as a gift please enter the giveaway I've left the information in the description of this video and also in a pinned comment in the comment section anyway I'm just going to include the video with a short piece that I put together all recorded on the behringer just to show that it is completely usable even if it's not the absolute pristine quality they say it is thank you very much for watching hope to see you in the next one - bye for now [Music] [Laughter] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 517,468

Rating: 4.9032512 out of 5

Keywords: cheapest on amazon, cheapest audio interface, budget audio interface, comparison, vs, best, cheap audio interface, behringer um2, behringer Uphoria UM2, review, testing the cheapest, I bought the, cheapest, budget, audio recording, budget audio interfaces, cheap audio, cheap gear, studio gear, in the mix, honest review, music production, guitar recording, Behringer review, um2 review, behringer U-Phoria Review/test, cheap vs expensive, audio examples

Id: Y3NK89-Vv1g

Length: 9min 33sec (573 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 13 2018