Review. Edirol ua1ex usb audio device for laptop or tower.(inexpensive)

[manning1]

review ROLAND/EDIROL UA1EX...around 80 buks.
i was reviewing this unit to help a friend.(tested on pc not mac.)
PLEASE NOTE NOT THE OLDER VERSION....the E version if you get one.
this is the latest.
note...it has line inputs for feeding from say a mixer or mice pre or anything with a line out. the line outs connect to your monitoring.
its a usb audio in/out device.
major points plusses.
1. practically immeasurable noise floor on the inputs i found.
your sending device will prolly have more noise.
this really impressed me for recording. i recorded blank tracks.
no noise. extremely low dc offset. 0.002 per cent if i remember.
2. easy install of its usb driver.
3. decent manual.
4. tracks synced useing mme. no problems.
5. has input monitoring fed to out.(so you can hear what your recording.)
6. headphone jack also. with level control plus for line ins
a level control. highly usefull for setting level in audio software.
major points minuses.
1. its asio 2 compliant but when i tried asio could not get it to work
properly. will try some more if time.
2. under mme i had some clicks intially but by changeing the
buffer setting in the audio software it solved the prob.
and i set its control panel for the device (just a baby control panel)
to a higher setting.

i set it for 16 bit 44.1 and it worked fine.
higher rates are supported like 24 bit. but didnt have a chance to try.
i'll report further if i get a chance.
what impressed me overall was very very low noise, and ease of install a breeze.
in summary if someones doing recording of audio with a terrible built in
pc soundcard it might be worth demoing/considering or say with laptop sound as its usb.
just be prepared to do a little buffer//setting up with it.
if your useing midi as well youll need a seperate midi usb device.
cos OBVIOUSLY this wont output midi.
thus youll need a little mixer to mix the outs of midi sound generators plus the audio from ua1ex.
which is an AUDIO ONLY DEVICE. it would also do duty to record ones old vinyl collection to cd as well.
(all in the manual). it has some optical features (mentions hooking up to minidisk etc)..i didnt have time to try.
but overall...say for the person doing just audio recording..it might be worth
considering as its very clean.
particularly might be usefull for folks who dont want to futz with installing a pci sound card or folks with a laptop that want to do some clean recording of demoes/song ideas on the road or in a hotel room etc,. i should say i found the playback sound quite full and played back a number of songs. definitely much more detailed sound than many of the poor consumer sound cards around.peace.ymmv.