Edirol UA20 USB Audio/MIDI Interface 24/44.1kHz

It would have been nice to have stereo 1/4" outputs as well as the stereo 1/4" inputs, but other than that this device is amazing. The MIDI is incredibly stable, even while running all 16 channels simultaneously.

I use it with Logic 5.3 platinum for Windows Xp with a 2.4ghz Pentium 4 and 1g RAM. I've tried the AudioSport Quattro... crashed my computer. I've tried the Emagic EMI 6|2m... Emagic's own hardware crashed its software. I've used the Digigram VXPocket V2, and it worked really well with my computer until the dongle broke.

Comparing the UA-20 with the VXPocket V2:
* the UA-20 allows you to monitor sound through your computer whether an audio application is on or not; definite plus
* the UA-20 uses 1/4 less processing power, and has just as little latency
* no dongles to be broken, and the RCA output jacks are sturdy
* headphone and input controls on the hardware

So far, this is the best audio/midi interface I've experienced or heard of for 2 in/out audio needs.

Quality:
the entire casing for this box is plastic, which i think puts some people off. i didn't mind it though.

Value:
find me a USB 2.0 box with the same low-latency WDM performance for cheaper and i'll buy that instead... hehe

Desirability:
the blue status LED lights up constantly when your system is powered and the UA-20 is plugged in, which for me was cool.

Sound:
this box is not aimed at people who don't know what they're doing, as the above reviews seem to indicate. i personally had no problems with the UA-20. i plugged it in and installed the driver and with one system reset i was up and running. it seems to me that this box is aimed primarily at the softsynth user. I use Cubase SX, Reason, and AudioMulch for "real-time" soft synthesis. in AudioMulch using the UA-20's WDM specialized driver i can get my stable latency down to 3.2 ms. Reason reports a buffer of 144 samples or 4 ms. if you know what that means i assume you'd be impressed. i paid about $200 for mine, so for that measly sum i'm quite happy with the latency performance. the recording part of the box seems pretty good. because it supports WDM drivers, it has this weird live monitoring mode that you can use in any ASIO-compliant host application such as Cubase SX and AudioMulch. instead of 3ms latency you get something like .5 ms when monitoring a signal "through" the PC. it's pretty neat to be able to play a guitar or do vocals through the PC because you can use any VST or DX plug-in to process the signal, thus allowing you to explore a lot of different processing ideas. the only issues i have had with this box are: in Cubase SX when running about 80 VST insert plug-ins, i started having some issues and had to push up the buffer size a bit. i've got a fairly good system based around an Athlon XP 2400+ running at the stock 2 Ghz, with 1 GB of DDR 400 RAM. i should point out that increasing the buffer size doesn't change the "real-time" monitoring feature-it's still effectively in real time. the only gripe there is that to have your buffer settings take effect you have to close out all your audio applications and then re-open them. along those lines, i had occasional times when the audio just stopped working. that seems to be when the buffer just gets totally under-run, like when you patch in a particularly CPU-intensive effect. in Cubase SX, this sort of behavior is fixed simply by closing and re-opening Cubase. the other major issue with this box is when you use it to process an incoming signal and you put a lot of distortion or overdrive on the incoming signal. doing this reveals some noise that sounds like cross-talk from the host computer. of course, i'm talking about really intense distortion effects that magnify everything a whole lot. for those you really gotta put a gate on the signal. other than that, everything i've tried to do has been really nice. if you're a gigging softsynth user in search of really low latency, this box is a winner.

Support:
this is the other thing that didn't impress me. there is one generation of drivers for this box, all at version 1.0 and all almost 2 years old. come on, Roland! gimme an updated driver!