Cheers,

Paul

Would anyone be interested ?

Boky

Set the CPU scheduling to “background services” in the system control panel. Both the readme and manual mention this. Once the driver gets more CPU time, most dropouts and latency problems go away. Also check whether there’s anything running that’s hogging the CPU/file operations (like an antivirus), and don’t bother saving to a USB drive, record to the internal hard drive (the readme mentions that too). Basically check for any interference (USB, hard drive, PCI bus, etc.) that can draw resources away from the interface.

Anyway, this is a great thing just for playing music. A lot cleaner and more detailed/spatial sound than most common soundcard. For a MIDI musician, this is essential too, as it has low latency (real latency range is something like 3-20 msec.) and supports 96 KHz. They have saved on the headphone output, it’s not as loud as it could be, but it does drive AKG K-240 Studio.

Extreme_Boky: how does one open the thing up? There’re no visible screws.

Dan

I believe this is the case at 96kHz level only. It is full duplex below that and should record and playback.

The UA-1G is a very affordable Entry-Leven Device for Home Studio and as far I can read in the manual – it can only record OR Playback but not both.

Many People use it for Recording Instruments at home and others for Audio Playback (with foobar2000 and ASIO for bit-exact audiophile Playback).

For 40-50 bucks it better than all the Terratec Aureon 5.1 USB and Creative USB crap. Just sayin

regards

Rolf

“A-to-D and D-to-A chip is AK4556 (very high quality device designed for portable audio)
DIR is AK4114″

Wow. I just ordered it because I search a small USB Audio Interface for my Notebook and alle the Creative & NoName & Cheapo Crap uses low-fi DA from VIA, ESS, Realtek……….AKM is good. Thanks for the review and the comments…very helpful.

cheers

Alan

Now – the sound quality….

In its original form, the sound is a bit soft for my licking. I remember having 002 audio interface (with ProTools 7.3.1) at my place for couple of weeks. This was also a bit soft for my taste… but that was before I modified it. After the mods were done, this audio interface sounded amazing… but it required major rework. The UA-1G sounded similar – soft and slightly shut-in. But still it sounded really good for the money! So, can it be improved? Definitely, but I did not want to go with external power supply. The whole package is very portable and handy, so installing an additional jack for 5V DC in and using low noise external power supply would be really cumbersome. So, the only other solution was to check what could be done with PC USB power (ouch!). Before I start, here are some details about A-to-D / D-to-A chip and DIR chip:
A-to-D and D-to-A chip is AK4556 (very high quality device designed for portable audio)
DIR is AK4114 (very capable digital audio interface device)
So, the hardware is there… but single +5V rail took its toll. There are too many signal coupling caps, but there’s no other way with +5V DC, unfortunately.

3 things I did to boost the quality:

1. I used an extra filtering cap at the “input” where the USB power is fed to the UA-1G PCB. The capacitor in question is probably the best (still) available – Black Gate 0.1uF /50V N type. I soldered it on the PCB “under-side” right across black and red wires.
2. The in-series inductor used at the “input” (as filter) is bypassed with a peace of ribbon (wire). The idea is great (to filter high frequency noise coming from the PC USB port)… but it just never works with large inductance in series with power supply rails… The above mentioned Black Gate is great at doing this job. I measured DC drop of 200mV across this choke (inductor) with UA-1G fully “loaded” – so there’s plenty of small diameter wire windings that should definitely be bypassed.
3. The crystal oscillator (6MHz) case was grounded. I used a bit of ribbon (wire) and soldered the case to ground.

The result?

Sound firmed-up and gained in definition – just what I wanted. The original tape and the exported file sounded almost identical. There was just a very tiny hint of softness still present in exported file, but I blame cheap and long-ish USB litz cable for this. The end-result was excellent.

I bought a different product yesterday, Line 6 UX1 and nearly smashed it up with a hammer after having all kinds of problems trying to enable ASIO in Sonar 6 LE. It was defaulting to MME and not letting me change. I have spent hours searching Cakewalk pages and Line6 forums etc for a fix, your link to the fix has sorted it! I have an audigy 2 within PC and thought it must be conflicting. Still not 100% sure if i like the UX1… but at least i can try it now.
Cheers mate