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Behringer U-Control UCA202

PostPosted: 20 Nov 2017, 16:44
by englishtim
Hi Everyone,

After great success with RuneAudio on my first-gen Raspberry Pi Model B into a FiiO E10K (Compatibility report: post5484.html#p5484), I decided I needed another Rune in my life... :D

This one's a brand-new Pi 3 Model B (1Gb, Revision 1.2, code a02082), running into a Behringer U-Control UCA202 (http://www.music-group.com/Categories/B ... 02/p/P0484). I'm using the combo to drive the following:

  • My "man-cave" / office system: Denon M38DAB micro-system with ancient home-built KEF Cresta II / Caprice I speakers (http://international.kef.com/explore-ke ... ii-1970-72 ) - ancestors of the legendary BBC LS3/5A;
  • Pro-Ject Head Box S driving my wonderful Sennheiser HD 650 headphones.

The Pi 3's USB power output seems to be somewhat better than the first-gen Pi, so I've connected the UCA202 directly to the Pi instead of via a powered USB hub.

The UCA202's a real find - it's been around for years so is well-proven, the technical performance via Line-Out is properly excellent (see Nwavguy's review for details: http://nwavguy.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/b ... eview.html), and all for well under £30 in the UK. I originally bought mine to do room measurements via Room Equalisation Wizard (https://www.roomeqwizard.com/), as it was one of the few low-cost USB sound-cards I'd found that handled Line-In.

The UCA202 seems to work absolutely fine with RuneAudio - I'm using v0.3-beta (23/03/2016), updated via Gitpull. I'm once again keeping things relatively simple:

  • AirPlay, Spotify and Last.fm are switched off;
  • All music's held on my old Synology DS212 NAS;
  • File-formats are mostly 16-bit/44k ALAC or 320k MP3, with a few AAC files here and there;
  • Network connection is via wired Ethernet;

As with my FiiO E10K compatibility report I had to resort to Alsamixer to increase gain from the UCA202 - setting it to -3dB / 88 works well. I also had to choose a different player hostname in "Settings", as you might expect. Apart from that the setup was really straightforward, and works well. I haven't had a chance to experiment with different Sound Signatures yet, but the default "RuneAudio" signature seems to work well enough anyway.

For the record, the UCA202 uses a Burr-Brown / TI PCM2902 DAC, and is specified to 16 bit / 48kHz.

Here's the Debug report on Pastebin:

https://pastebin.com/tL7MS1Lk

Once again, many thanks to the RuneAudio team - it's a great product, and is IMHO by far the best OS out there for DIY network music players. Keep up the excellent work!

Peace and friendship,
englishtim

Re: Behringer U-Control UCA202

PostPosted: 11 Jan 2018, 12:52
by rastus
"...I originally bought mine to do room measurements via Room Equalisation Wizard..."

Yep, same here.... the Behringer U-Control UCA202, for the exact same reasons too... don't use it now though, I'm presently after one of those BOSS dac's...