Audient EVO or Steinburg UR22C?

[Esther P.Participant]

I’m considering one of the two, I know the Audient has USB-C but is it the same as getting a USB 3 like the Steinburg?

[Jürgen SchulerParticipant]

Hi Esther,

Short answer: It depends on what you want to do with it, if you're running Windows or Mac, if you have MIDI outboard gear, and so on. Both are viable options, but totally different beasts. I have the UR22C, and I can tell you what I like, what I don't like, what other people critizise, and why I bought it.

To get the biggest topic out of the way: The preamps of the UR22C are outdated. Yamaha, who build the UR22C and brand it as Steinberg, should have updated the input stage. The input stage appears to be substantially identical to its predecessor, while the Audient interfaces are celebrated for their preamps. But both are more than capable, and I never had any reason to complain. Steinberg/Yamaha and Audient do not publish numbers that allow a direct comparison of the two side-by-side. It appears, both need an inline-preamp for recordig an SM7B, at least I use one.

Apart from that, the EVO has the automatic gain setting, and that's about it. And it's said to loose its internal settings when powered off. But I can't confirm that.

The UR22C has MIDI connectors, a build-in DSP with a somewhat strange compressor, but it works, supports 192kHz (the guitar amp sims can only cope with 96k) and can be chosen to be recorded or just used for monitoring. The over-all round-trip latency I can get is about 3.3 ms. That's good enough for tracking even vocals through my DAW (64 samples buffer size at 192 kHz). This is the only reason I track at 192 kHz.

The power consumption of the DSP is the main reason, why it's a USB-C device. Do to an incompatibility with some USB chip sets under Windows 10, I have to switch the device into USB 2.0 mode, which is in terms of data speed absolutely no problem. I can  achieve the round-trip latency in this USB 2.0 mode.

These are the reasons, why I bought the UR22C. I let it compete against the Moto M-2, which does not have a DSP, but promised an even smaller round-trip latency, I couldn't realize under Windows 10 (32 samples of buffer size @ 192 kHz). I had severe distortions on the output in the form of several ten clicks per second. At 64 samples there were still clicks, although the number was down to about 1 per second, while the UR22C did not have that problem. In retrospective, I know why Moto's support was a bit vague here.

Cheers,

Jürgen

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