There’s something strangely unsatisfying about a piece of hardware that does exactly what it says on the tin without messing around with system settings or crashing your machine horribly: I’m so used to installing PC hardware being a horrendous ordeal, at the end of which having the hardware doing anything remotely like it claims to almost seems like reward enough in itself. When everything goes smoothly and works first time, you can’t help but feel slightly cheated, in a way. That’s how it is with my new toy, the Edirol UA-5 USB audio interface.
I’ve been after a new audio interface for my laptop for a while – the onboard sound is frankly rubbish (and the latency sucks some major ass), and this has limited any compositional activities to using software synths and samples I found on the internet. Which is fine, but a little limiting, especially when you’ve got a stack of other instruments and outboard synths and things gathering dust, waiting to be used. So when the UA-5 appeared on Academy of Sound‘s website for nearly £150 less than usual, I figured it was too good a deal to pass up and snapped it up.
Edirol call the UA-5 an “Audio Capture” device, and given the plethora of input options, this is understandable: two channel input via digital optical and coaxial or analogue XLR (with optional 48V phantom power for ribbon and capacitor mics), 1/4″ jack (balanced or unbalanced, optional hi-z) and coxial analogue, sampling at 44.1kHz, 48kHz or 96kHz at up to 24bit – basically, if you’ve got something that makes a sound, this thing will record it. However, the output options are only slightly less impressive: analogue via stereo jack, and two pairs of coaxials, and digital via optical or coax. All this comes in a half-rack width box which plugs into a standard USB 2 port (although an external power supply is needed) and comes supplied with the now essential low-latency ASIO drivers, along with the standard WDM and MME drivers (although quite why you’d want to use those is beyond me).
The thing is, though, for all that impressive specification, there isn’t really much you can say beyond the fact that it works, and it works well. There’s no buzz, hum or hiss; the sound quality is crisp and clean; the ASIO drivers are stable and fast. It does exactly what it claims to, with no fuss or hassle.
But, to be fair – what else does it need to do? This isn’t a consumer soundcard – in fact, it is the very antithesis of the consumer soundcard. It doesn’t have surround outputs. It doesn’t come bundled with games to show off its special effects capabilities, because it has none. It doesn’t have a huge speaker setup application. It has no need for hundreds of megabytes of silly bundled apps that make your MP3s sound like they’re being played back in a cave, underwater, by Alvin and the Chipmunks. This is a box for getting sound in and out of your computer quickly, cleanly and without fuss. And that’s exactly what it does, and it does it very well indeed.